"This model is at least 14 years old, so no it’s long, long out of production as well as the OEM motherboard. However, a lot of midrange systems today like Pentium and i3 systems will easily outperform these and can use NVMe SSDs which is not possible on these systems due to the architecture.The caveat to be aware of is the Core i3 and Pentium chips may not match fully loaded Wolfdale Core 2 Duo systems - those match up better performance wise to a nice mid-spec i3 on a budget, but preferably an i5. The reason for the gap based on spec (to an extent) is the Wolfdale Core 2 series held its own for years, even with quad core desktop chips. Yes, they got eaten up by benchmarks day by day (even first gen Core i beat them) starting with Sandy Bridge, but their everyday performance with the high-end variants (Ex: E8200) was proving to hold its own for a long time after that. The nuke to that throne was Haswell, and the nuke for Haswell was cheap NVMe SSDs when NVMe capable surplus was out there.
Despite its weird gap in time - which the i7-3770 is still holding to this day (but Microsoft did that in with Win11) — No, DO NOT BUY ONE unless it’s cheap and you know what you’re buying - they’re just too old to spend much if anything on now. Time has put the Core 2 into the history bin now. THAT SAID, if someone gave it to you it was a real long run for what essentially became beater systems for us fixers after they got cheap.
The only reason to use one today beyond a hobbyist toy is legacy applications that needs WinXP or Vista (and virtualization is not an option). Beyond that, they’re just too old for consumer use."
