Every Jetliner Ever Made: Fokker, VFW-Fokker, Fairchild, and Fairchild-Dornier

 

Let's continue to look at Every Jetliner Ever Made, in alphabetical order. Today we're going to look at Fokker, of the Netherlands, and also the short-lived VFW-Fokker joint venture that rose and fell in the 1960s and 1970s, and also Fairchild, a US company that partnered up with Fokker and is technically before Fokker in the alphabet but please be quiet. And Dornier, who have no connection with Fokker, but they partnered up with Fairchild, so they're cousins.

FOKKER, VFW-FOKKER, FAIRCHILD, and FAIRCHILD-DORNIER (Netherlands, Germany, The United States)
Before I begin, there's one thing that annoys me. Fokker is, or was, an aircraft manufacturer from The Netherlands, although initially it was based in Berlin. The company was founded in 1912 by a Dutch gentleman called Anthony Fokker. When he was young, he was a little Fokker, but as an adult he was of average height for a Dutch gentleman in the first part of the twentieth century.

 

During the First World War Fokker made a string of state-of-the-art fighter aircraft that were flown by the German Flying Corps. Fokker's first big success was the Eindecker monoplane, which had a top speed of around 100mph in a dive, hot stuff for 1915. It only had a single machine-gun, but the gun was equipped with a revolutionary synchronisation gear that allowed the pilot to fire it straight through the propeller disc without blasting off the propeller blades.

 

Mr Fokker, with one of his Eindeckers.  

Thus equipped German fighter pilots realised they could dive on their enemies at speed, shoot off a burst of accurate machine-gun fire, then climb away again before the enemy could react. Thus "boom and zoom" combat was invented. Later in the war Fokker built the DR1 triplane, famously flown by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, and the DRVII, which was one of the most capable fighters of the late-war years. The post-war Armistice required that Germany hand over its remaining DRVIIs to the allies, and it remained in front line service with some European nations into the late 1920s.

 

 

Perhaps because he was technically Dutch rather than German, Fokker recovered quickly after the First World War. In the run-up to the Second World War Fokker continued to make warplanes, but this time the company was one of the good guys. Fokker was one of the goodies. The D.XXI, pictured above, was flown by the Netherlands and Finland, while the sleek, twin-engined GI might have staved off the Luftwaffe a little longer if it had been built in greater numbers. In the end the Netherlands only managed to resist Germany for a few days before capitulating. Perhaps fortunately Anthony Fokker was not around to see it happen, having died in 1939.

 

During the war one of German's best fighter planes was made by a company called Focke-Wulf, which sounds a little bit like Fokker, but the two companies were completely unrelated. So, whenever a stereotypical 1970s club comedian makes a joke about attending a school function where an RAF guest complains that he was surrounded by Fokkers, and the teacher explains that the guest is actually talking about Messerschmits, to which the pilot responds that he knew what he said, it's balls. It couldn't have happened. He wouldn't have been surrounded by Fokkers. He would have been surrounded by Focke-Wulfs, and he would have known it.

That might sound trivial, and I realise that I have now used up one-quarter of the article on an irrelevance, but I just had to get it off my chest. Comedy doesn't work without a foundation of truth. That's why randomly-generated jokes are never funny. They're just arbitrary nonsense. The whole essence of comedy is subversion of the truth. If there's no truth, comedy is just chaos. There is no comedy in the absence of truth.

No comedy in the absence of truth. I begin. Dah dah dah Fokker was founded in 1912 by Anthony Fokker of the Netherlands, although the company itself was headquartered in Berlin. Business took a downturn in November 1918, so he moved back to the Netherlands and founded Nederlandse Vliegtuigenfabriek, perhaps wary of using the Fokker name again. An order from the US Army resulted in him founding the Atlantic Aircraft Company of New Jersey, which eventually ended up being bought by General Motors and merged into North American Aviation having achieved not a great deal.

 

The European branches of Fokker were much more successful. In the 1950s the European Fokker had a big hit with the Fokker F27 Friendship turboprop airliner, pictured above. It's outside the scope of this document, but the success of the F27 prompted Fokker to develop a jet airliner, which entered revenue service in 1969 as the Fokker F28 Fellowship.
 

The Fellowship was a completely fresh design. It was a regional jet, one of the first, specifically aimed at the short-range market. It had a configuration that went on to become standard for regional jets, with two rear-mounted engines and a T-tail, viz the following image of four different small airliners:

 

Why do so many small jets have rear-mounted engines and a T-tail? There are a couple of reasons. Smaller jets tend to sit lower to the ground, so it makes sense to mount the engines as high as possible in order to keep them away from runway debris. Another advantage is that the undercarriage can be made shorter and more robust, and freight doesn't have to be lifted so high. The T-tail came about because the main wings of an airliner leave a trail of disturbed air in their wake, which reduces the control authority of the tailplane, so it makes sense to lift the tail above the engines, out of the shadow of the wings.

The F28 was available in four different variants, with seating for 65-85 passengers and a range of 1,000-1,500 miles. It sold 241 units, mostly to airlines in Australia, the Far East, and Europe. I'm not an expert on the regional jet market, but I have the impression that 1969 was slightly too soon to target the US hub-and-spoke model, which in the 1970s was still dominated by turboprops. The F28 was smaller than the Douglas DC-9 and BAC One-Eleven, which were more versatile because they were just large enough for point-to-point routes.
 

The F28 remained on sale until 1987, ironically leaving production just as regional jets were starting to become popular. Do you notice how I say "starting to become popular", instead of "starting to take off"? That's because I despise the kind of lazy newspaper writing whereby an airline in financial difficulties "encounters turbulence" or it "rides out the headwinds". It's superficially clever, but it's hollow.

I despise the kind of lazy newspaper writing whereby a science fiction film "has a galaxy of stars", or a film set at sea "sinks with all hands" or "is swamped with cliches", or a film in which a serial killer murders people with a sieve "has a plot that has more holes than a sieve". Let it be known that I, Ashley Pomeroy, refused to fill up space with nonsense. Because I, Ashley Pomeroy, outrank trank.

Earlier in this article, many words ago, I mentioned Focke-Wulf. During the Second World War the company was responsible for the FW-190, one of Germany's top fighter aircraft. It was produced in lesser numbers than the Messerschmitt 109, but had a more modern design, and was still competitive at the end of the war. In the post-war years Focke-Wulf concentrated on gliders, and latterly rocketry, and in 1964 it merged with Weserflug to form VFW, which eventually ended up as part of Airbus.

 

Before it did so VFW and Fokker teamed up to make a regional jet, and thus Fokker and Focke-Wulf briefly collaborated. The result was the VFW-Fokker 614, pictured above, which first flew in 1971 and entered revenue service in 1975. The VFW 614 was an oddity. As mentioned earlier regional jets tend to use rear-mounted engines, because smaller jets don't have enough clearance to hang the engines from the wings unless the undercarriage is very tall.

There are however good technical reasons for hanging the engines from the wings. The weight of the engines counteracts the natural tendency of the wings to bend upwards during flight, which means that the wings can be made lighter, because they don't need as much structural reinforcement. Putting the engines in the wings also means that the control wires and fuel lines don't have to go through the rear of the fuselage, which means that the cabin can be stretched backwards a little bit. It also makes it a lot easier for technicians to work on the engines.

The VFW 614 was an attempt to combine the benefits of high-mounted engines with the benefits of wing-mounted engines, by putting the engines in pods on top of the wings. The end result was visually distinctive. Only a handful of other aircraft have used over-the-wing engines, most famously the Boeing YC-14 experimental transport (pictured below) and the visually similar Antonov AN-72. With careful design the engine exhaust can be made to flow over the wing, generating lift, although that wasn't a factor in the case of the VFW 614.

 

The positioning also frees up space that would otherwise be used in the rear of the aircraft. The VFW 614 itself was eight metres shorter than the basic Embraer ERJ, for example, but carried just as many passengers. On the downside the arrangement put the engines right next to the cabin, which complicated servicing and led to complaints about engine noise. The close proximity of the emergency exit to the jet intake worries me.
 

The VFW 614 was specifically designed to have a short take-off run. In the late 1960s one of the big new ideas was the STOLport, STOL standing for Short Take-Off and Landing. A STOLport has a short runway intended to service roughly the same market as a train station, in locations where there isn't space for train lines. STOLPorts make sense in remote parts of the world, where they're often the only practical way to get from one town to the next, but they never became a mainstream thing. Disneyworld in Florida briefly trialled a STOLport, but noise regulations largely killed them off, combined with the fact that aircraft optimised for short take-off tend not to be very fuel-efficient. They need burly powerplants and thick wings, whereas a long-range airliner is more akin to a graceful gazelle, with thin wings and engines that provide most of their power at high altitude.

The VFW 614 carried 40-44 passengers over a range of about 700 miles. It was aimed at the kind of small airlines that still used the Douglas DC-3. Throughout this series of articles the DC-3 casts a long shadow. In the post-war years it dominated regional air. There were several attempts to capture the same market with a jet aircraft, all of which foundered on the simple fact that war-surplus DC-3s were cheap, and jet aircraft are expensive.

By all accounts the VFW 614's engine arrangement was sound, but the aircraft itself was a commercial disaster on a par with the Dassault Mercure. Development began in the late 1960s, but by the time it entered service it was obvious that the short range and odd specification were never going to make economic sense compared to a turboprop. Cimber Air of Denmark bought two, a pair of French airlines bought another two each, and the West German Luftwaffe bought three, for a grand total of ten sales, one less than the Mercure.

In total nineteen were produced, including three prototypes, one of which crashed. The majority were bought back by VFW in the late 1970s and scrapped, including several airframes that had been constructed but left unsold. This saved VFW the cost of having to produce spare parts but does mean that sourcing photographs for this document was not easy. The Luftwaffe flew their three 614s until the 1980s. One remained in the air as a testbed for Daimler Benz Aerospace until the late 1990s and another was flown by the German government, also as a testbed, until 2012.

Part of the problem seems to have been a lack of enthusiasm for the type from Fokker. The VFW 614 was backed by the West German government in the hope that it would boost the German commercial aviation industry. Fokker was brought in for its greater experience selling commercial jets to the international market, but the VFW 614 ended up competing with the Fokker F28, and in any case the market for a faster, more expensive Douglas DC-3 that had half the range just wasn't there.

A handsome-looking pre-war Fairchild JK-1, a one-off variation of the Fairchild 45 made for the US Navy.

 

Moving swiftly on, in the 1950s Fairchild Aviation of the United States struck a deal with Fokker to licence-build the F27 Friendship turboprop. This resulted in Fairchild developing a stretched version of the F27, the Fairchild FH-227, and when Fokker announced the F28 jetliner Fairchild tried to repeat the process.

 

The Fairchild 228 was envisaged as a licence-built Fokker F28, with a smaller fuselage that could carry 50 passengers. It had the same arrangement as the F28 - T-tail, rear engines - but with more efficient Rolls Royce Trents instead of Speys. Unfortunately development of the Trent took longer than expected, and in the end Fairchild decided to cancel the project after only making two prototypes. At the point the Fokker-Fairchild arrangement petered out, although Fairchild will reappear a few paragraphs from now.

 

Fokker had more luck with the Fokker 70 and Fokker 100, which were developed as replacements for the Fokker 28. The Fokker 100, pictured above, was essentially a stretched F28, slotting into the aviation market in between smaller full-sized jets, such as the Boeing 737, and regional jets from Embraer and Bombardier. It carried around one hundred passengers over a range of around 1500 miles, with the Fokker 70 following it to market slightly later as essentially a two-thirds-length Fokker 100.

Development of the Fokker 100 began in 1983 and continued throughout the rest of the 1980s, with the type entering service in 1988. Its commercial prospects were boosted by a large order from American Airlines, but Fokker had problems. Its commercial airline business was sweet, but the company made most of its money from licence-building warplanes, such as the Lockheed F-104 and General Dynamics F-16. French defence giant DASA bought a large stake in the company in 1993, but DASA itself was in financial trouble as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which depressed defence sales throughout the 1990s. Bombardier briefly considered buying Fokker, but backed out, and the Danish government decided not to intervene, so ultimately Fokker declared bankruptcy in January 1996, even though the Fokker 100 and 70 were still in production.

The factory remained in operation for a year or so afterwards, with Fokker going on to sell 283 Fokker 100s and 47 Fokker 70s. The rights to produce the two aircraft were bought up by a successor company, Rekkof, but to date production has not restarted, which is a shame because the design was attractive. As of this writing some aircraft remain in service, but parts availability will apparently cease in 2030.

Do you remember Fairchild from a few paragraphs ago? In the late 1990s Fairchild purchased Dornier of Germany. Dornier was another storied European aviation manufacturer. In the post-war years it concentrated on small, high-performance regional turboprops. Dornier had ambitions to sell a jet, but the company didn't have enough money to develop one.

The Dornier 328JET (top) was closely based on the turboprop-powered Dorner 328 (bottom). 

 

Fairchild's cash solved that problem, but only briefly, because Fairchild itself was in trouble, for more or less the same reason as DASA. By the time the Fairchild-Dornier 328JET entered service, in 1999, Fairchild was on its last legs, and production only continued until 2003. Fairchild-Dornier managed to sell just over 100 328JETs, and by all accounts it was a good design, but the company just didn't have the money to sell it effectively. Whatever remains of Fairchild appears to have evaporated into the world of private equity, while support for the Dornier 328 and 328JET is managed by the Sierra Nevada Corporation.

What was it like? It was essentially a jet-powered variation of the Dornier 328, with a T-tail, and two engines hung from pylons below a high-mounted wing. The configuration was similar to the BAe 146, but much smaller, with two engines instead of four. It had a distinctive, blade-like "supercritical wing" that was optimised for high cruise speeds, and a passenger capacity of 30-33 people. A stretched version, the 428JET, was in development when Fairchild collapsed. It would have carried 44 people. As with the Fokker 100 there is a slim hope that production might one day restart, although several attempts to get the aircraft back into production have come to nothing.

The 328JET targeted the same market as the VFW-614, a market that was once saturated with the Douglas DC-3. In the 1990s it seemed that the short-range market was going to be taken over by jets, but the 1990s was a time of plenty, and over the last two decades or so the turboprop market has managed to survive. This is of course completely out of the scope of this document, but it will be interesting to see if the short-range, 30-40 seat market leads to a resurgence of turboprop sales.

 

Next, the letter G. Did Grumman build a jetliner? No. So let's skip to H. Did Hughes build a jetliner? No. How about I. Did Ilyushin build a jetliner? No... yes. Actually yes! They did!

Tarting up an Old PC

Back in October 2025 I replaced my PC. After fourteen years of good service my old PC still worked just fine, but in October 2025 Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10, and there was no way to upgrade the motherboard so that it was compatible with Windows 11. The hardware was more than powerful enough to run Windows 11, but the motherboard didn't have a TPM 2.0 security chip, and there was no way to add one, so I had to replace the whole machine.

At the time I was annoyed. Confused. Even a little bit hurt. Microsoft usually has my best interests at heart, but sometimes my faith is tested, and this was one of those times. It was a distressing period in my life. I don't like to think about it. However I now realise that Microsoft was right all along. It wasn't Microsoft that was at fault. It was me. I was the problem.

Why? Because shortly after I upgraded my PC, memory prices skyrocketed. On 10 October 2025 I paid £40.99 for 16gb of memory, which seemed reasonable enough, but within the space of six weeks or so the price went boom. As of 10 July 2026 the exact same memory is £108.99:

 

I like to think that Microsoft knew this in advance. Their decision to end support of Windows 10 was a friendly way of nudging me into a new age. If only I had listened to Microsoft and bought 32gb of memory, or 64gb.  I could have sold half of it a few weeks later and made a profit. So, thank you, Jyoti Mishra. You pushed me to make a decision I was unable to make on my own. I love you, Microsoft. I would like to be your tradwife. Chain me to the kitchen. I don't mind, as long as you love me in return.

 

That is enough of Microsoft. Ordinarily, when I upgrade my PC, I end up with some parts that I put to one side. I promise that I'll assemble the parts into another PC, but I never do. Then I sell the parts on eBay. But not this time. This time my new PC was almost a completely fresh build. The only things I carried over were the mouse, keyboard, speakers, and GPU, because GPU prices have also gone through the roof, albeit that it happened a few years ago, and the culprit was Bitcoin rather than AI.

 

This left me with almost an entire second PC, so I decided to tart it up. It's now entering retirement, but it deserves a fresh lick of paint. Here it is, as it was when it was:

 

I assembled it back in 2011. I used the cheapest case I could find. It was built around an Intel i5-2500K, fitted into an ASRock H67M-GE motherboard - I wasn't interested in overclocking - with 8gb of memory, a hard drive of some description, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I wanted to jump from 32-bit Windows XP to the high-def age of 64-bit Windows 7. I wanted to jump from grainy Realmedia files of top 2000s porn legends Vanessa Blue and Aria Giovanni to crisp 1080p MP4 videos of Ana Foxxx and Mistress T, and also Aria Giovanni because she aged well. In fact she was hot in the 1990s. She is still hot. I did other things as well, but that was the main thing.

 

Aria Giovanni will never appear in lists of the most good-looking women of the 1990s or 2000s, because the media is far too embarrassed to write about porn stars. Nonetheless she was in the top tier, but I'm digressing here.

 

At first, back in 2011, I did without a GPU, because I wanted a big empty case with lots of airflow, and I didn't envisage playing many games. That decision lasted about six weeks before I caved in and bought a Geforce 9600. Over the years I added an extra 4gb of memory, for a peculiar total of 12gb. I swapped the hard drive for an SSD, and used the hard drive as a big dumb hunk of storage. I upgraded the GPU again. Faced with the brutal demands of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in 2020 which is the year it came out that's 2020 I replaced the CPU with a Xeon 1275. Along the way I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

 

The end result was a machine that had roughly the same power as a cylindrical 2013 Apple Mac Pro, but with a much more powerful graphics system. Sadly it has reached the end of its upgrade path. There appears to be no way to modify an LGA 1155 system so that it's compatible with Windows 11. There were never any LGA 1155 motherboards with TPM 2.0, and there's no way to add a separate TPM 2.0 card because it needs low-level access to the BIOS. Still, the PC served me well for fourteen years.

 

It seems a shame to leave the machine gathering dust, so I decided to tart it up. Firstly, a new case. The old case is a cheap thing I bought locally. It was so old it had two slots for optical drives, plus a single USB slot on the front. On reflection I may well have bought it for my even-older PC, which was built around an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, and kept it when I upgraded. Still, I emptied it out, this dusty box of dreams that has been my sexual partner for so long:

 

Given the fact that several generations have now grown up and lost their virginity to internet porn, you'd think that people would now associate keyboards and PCs with sexual arousal, and would thus become sexually aroused by PCs. But that hunk of aluminium stirs nothing inside me. 

 

What to do with it? It has too many sharp edges to work as furniture. I briefly thought about stuffing it full of hard drives, plus a power supply, a couple of fans, and using it as some kind of RAID array. My old Mac mini sort of fits into the case, and MacOS has built-in software RAID:

 

I would presumably need a bunch of SATA-USB adapters, plus a USB hub. But why? What for? In the end I took it to the recycling centre and threw it away. Goodbye. But not before buying a new case. It's the same IONZ KZ19 Spin case I bought for my upgraded PC last year, for about £36:

 

As far as I can tell IONZ is one of those made-up=for-Amazon brands. Their website doesn't even list the KZ19 Spin. But it's an interesting design and it feels well-made, so why not. It comes with three free fans, two in the top and one at the back.

 

The next step was to re-arrange the motherboard, power supply, and storage. The old case has a conventional drives-at-the-front, everything-else-at-the-back arrangement. The Spin, as is the modern style, has the power supply in its own compartment in the base, hidden away with the drives, although it also has space on the "back side" of the motherboard mount for a bunch of solid state drives. This is where I put my aging, but still healthy Samsung 850 EVO.

 

Remounting everything involved a lot of fiddly threading of the cables, and in addition I had to raise the hard drive on little metal pegs so that there was space for the SATA power plug, but in the end I managed to get it all to fit.

 

 

The RM750x is overspecified for the rest of the hardware. Why is it there? As mentioned last year my new PC was flaky, and in the process of debugging I ended up swapping all of the components with my old PC to see which one was the weakest link.

 

In the end I determined that it was, to my surprise, the CPU, which is odd because CPUs generally don't break. As a consequence my new PC has my old Corsair RM550x power supply, and my old machine has a brand-new RM750x as a kind of running spare.

 

I have said it before, but I am always nervous when photographing reflective surfaces. What if I accidentally end up photographing a reflection of my own naked body? And so whenever I photograph objects that are made of metal or glass I crouch down in a large cardboard box, and I use a timer, plus a polarising filter. Cardboard is not reflective.

 

While sitting in the box I decided to upgrade the machine lightly. Back in 2011 8gb of memory was plenty. I still have the receipt. It cost me £44.98 back then. I remember thinking that by the time I needed 16gb of memory, DDR3 would be old-fashioned. A few years later I found a pair of 2gb sticks going cheap, so I added 4gb to the total, although I can't say that the machine ran any faster. By far the most impactful non-GPU upgrade was the Samsung 850 EVO SSD.

 

DDR3 has not been hit with the same price rises as DDR4, so I decided to upgrade the memory. I was also worried about having mismatched RAM - it feels dirty and wrong - so for the princely sum of £10.80 I bought four matching sticks of Micron 4gb DDR3. Here's the original memory, a mixture of 4gb sticks from Kingston and 2gb sticks from Micron:

 

And here are the replacements, looking very smart:

 

Did it make any difference to the machine's performance? Not at all! But it did work, at the very least:

 

Why 15.7gb? I believe some of the memory is siphoned off for the CPU's built-in graphics chip. Which reminds me. My old machine no longer has a GPU. The Xeon E3-1275 V2 has a built-in Intel P4000, which is apparently just a different name for the Intel HD4000, which is fine for browsing the internet but only really suitable for playing late-2000 / early-2010s games at 1280x720.

 

I can't imagine using the machine for anything particularly demanding - I have an entirely new PC for that - so I bought the cheapest decent entry-level GPU I could find, an AMD Radeon RX550:

 

It takes up two spaces in the backplate, so I had to remove the 4xUSB 3 PCI card you can see in the background. But it doesn't require extra power and it runs quietly:

 

Then I had a go at XCOM: Enemy Within, which ran at 1080 at around 45fps:

 

True story: in the next action I ordered my soldier to fire at point-blank range at the flanked sectoid. Ordinarily this is a guaranteed kill, but in this case her bullets only did two units of damage. On the next turn the Sectoid scurried behind the nearby car and shot my soldier, killing her! I quit in a rage. That's X-Com, baby.

 

The newest game I own is The Talos Principle 2, which uses Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is controversial for its use of AI to upscale low-resolution frames, and its steep system requirements, and also its baffling range of graphical options. In the case of Talos 2 no matter how I played with the settings the end result looked weird, with grainy blurry trails running behind moving objects.

 

Needless to say, with a simple entry-level card it ran poorly:

 

Knocking the resolution down to 1280x720 helped, but not much:

 

Albeit that even at 21fps the game would probably be playable. It's a contemplative puzzle game, not bloody Defender. I had forgotten how good-looking it is:

 

Alexandra Drennan, you magnificent bastard. You're dead! But you flung a light into the future, and the flames caught.

 

EDIT: In the months since I wrote this post I finally saw sense and removed the RX 550. I replaced it with the GTX 1650 it had beforehand, which is roughly four times more powerful:

 

 

For my main PC I bought a second-hand GTX 1080, which is roughly twice as powerful as the GTX 1650 despite being three years older. It requires auxiliary power and takes up a lot more space, but it has twice as much memory. It doesn't have ray-tracing, though, so I still can't play Doom: The Dark Ages.

 

As mentioned up the page I upgraded from the original i5-2500K to a Xeon because I wanted to do justice to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. That game is unusual, in that it taxes the entire machine - the GPU, the CPU, the internet connection, and the storage - and its performance can't be easily improved by just stuffing a new GPU into the case.

 

As a final touch I wasn't keen on having a glass panel - I know what's inside the machine, and I don't like the idea of turning it into a greenhouse - so I painted it with some B&Q Antibes blue paint, with a layer of varnish on top. It probably won't last (the glass is flexible) but it does the job:

 

 

Looking at the photo, I think I need to add another coat. I had some masking tape and orange paint, so around the back I gave it a Designer's Republic-inspired dash of colour, which has some ropey masking but nothing that can't be touched up.

 

 

Power consumption? My elderly quad-core Xeon 1275-powered PC idles at around 54w, when playing some music and with Firefox open, but ramps up to 100-120w when playing XCOM: Enemy Within. My new, also quad-core i3-12100F idles at 45w, going up to 74w when running XCOM: EW, which it launches faster and plays at a higher frame rate. So, it does more stuff while consuming less power. Doom: Eternal on my i3, at modest settings, at 1080p, with a Geforce 1650, hovers around 100w.

 

In contrast my 10-core, Xeon E5-2690-powered 2013 Mac Pro idles at around 65w, and it can't play XCOM: Enemy Within because MacOS dropped support for 32-bit applications a long time ago. I think the lesson is that if you want to save money, using a decade-old server-class Xeon is a bad idea.

 

And that is how I tarted up my old Windows 10 PC. The total cost was £36 for the case, £28 for the GPU, £10.80 for the memory, plus an afternoon slotting everything together. Ordinarily I bill my time at just over £200 an hour, but in this case it was a learning experience, so the total cost was around £75 to turn a worn old PC into a smart-looking PC that performs about as well as a mid-2010s smartphone but with a massively higher power draw. In a world where a brand-new Mac mini is £599, that money would feel like a waste, but sadly we live in a world where a brand-new Mac mini is now £799.

 

It still runs Windows 10. It would almost certainly run Linux just fine, but I have no need for a file server, and I have no plans to learn Python. The machine itself runs slightly warmer than its Intel i3-12100F-powered successor. With my new PC I only need to connect up the rear case fan to keep it cool, whereas the older Xeon benefits from having one of the case-top fans activated as well. As pictured above the stock Intel cooler looks like a joke, but then again it worked without fuss for fourteen years.

 

Does it have a use? Pragmatically it has a bunch of stuff installed that I still use occasionally, and it's not so old that it's just a pointless power hog. With two PCs that have the same case I could of course make a nice coffee table.