About 2 years ago I built my daughter a small gaming build.
7870K
Gigabyte 88 board
8 gig 2400 ram
Some Antec case with a 380 watt PSU included that was half off cause it was scratched
A T2 cooler
500 gig Sata 1 drive I had from a dell
Total price from MC was under 300
Used an old 19 inch emachines screen and keyboard
Not much but a start
Over the next 2 years I added
Blackweb gaming keyboard and mouse (thank you walmart!)
R7 250 for dual gfx
Drop dead beautiful HP 27 inch 1080 monitor with speakers
Replaced dead DVD drive
1 TB WD hd
250 gig Intel SSD
Upgrade to Win 10
Few weeks ago I swapped the r7 250 for a GTX 1060
Not exactly top shelf but for 2 years it has served my daughter well and lasted with no problems except a few BSODâs easily fixed by adding some juice to the Ram (1.6v vs 1.5v)
I am very proud of this my first build since my 5x86 133 from along time ago.
2 years is nothing. My build is 5.5 years old and still works great. The only thing I canât do is hardware passthrough in Linux. I say replacing a components should be done only when the current ones die or when you are not able to do your task.
Anyone can build a system to blow you out of the water.
It takes engineering, to build an efficient system that is just good enough to get the job done.
There are so many times when I find myself falling for the hype, i.e. âOooooh! Iâve gotta have that.â or âMy life wonât be complete until I acquire new widget X.â Then my inner engineer reminds me, âYou want that thing, you donât need it.â
I prefer to see builds that are lower budget. I find it a bit funny how hard people try to make some over the top build be âuniqueâ when it is a copy and paste of most other builds out there, save for color.
Excluding the failure of moving parts or capacitors gone bad, most old computers are still capable of doing everything they could when they were new. I dug up a couple P4âs recently and installed Mint on the better one (64 bit, 2GB RAM), and Raspbian x86 on the other (32 bit, 1GB RAM). You can still do basic desktop tasks with Mint machine, and Raspbian works fine for learning and possibly better than a Pi given all of the extra I/O ports.
Given universally accepted ports with backwards compatibility, you can make an old machine better than new. Better wifi, graphics, storage devices and more can swap back and forth. It might be fruitless to buy all new parts, but parts a few years old can breathe life into a machine many years older.
My main rig is a G1850 Celeron. I got the CPU the day it came out, and it was cheaper than the other socket 1150 Celerons at the time. $44 for a CPU and $55 for a motherboard made a nice upgrade from a 2.4GHZ C2D. I had everything else from older builds to make it work. Over time I added a small SSD for $25, video card for $35, better RAM for $35, more efficient PicoPSU for $35 - I use this thing every day with no complaints. It doesnât throw heat, itâs very quiet, very light on energy usage, and it has been reliable.
Numerous times I have been tempted to build a newer machine, but this one works great. Unless I can get a big bump in performance AND a sizable drop in energy use for a similar cost to this build then I wonât be upgrading until this motherboard croaks.
Itâs all good but those âbulldozerâ like cpus are pretty much trashy since I own a8-5600k and going from 3.9 to 4.5GHz makes almost no difference in any game tho. Gotta hate the thing that itâs so hard to find used 2nd or 3rd gen i7 (2600 or 3770 *non k cuz vt-d). Good thing is that apuâs onboard gpu is pretty good, also pci passthrou works like a charm on amd cpus.
My dauâs 7870k is stock but on my 7850k taking the iGPU from 720 to 900 got me a 12 percent jump in fps in starswarm stress test. It was stable at 960mhz but there was a drop in fps, I think if the iGPU gets to hot it causes the cpu part to throttle.
Weird that the FX responds so well to OCâing but the APUâs donât, guessing it is the missing L3 cache.
Granted I would like a Ryzen 7 or Haswell-E system for rendering and ML work, but Iâm an edge case. Average people do not need octocores
Fun fact: Haswell E outperforms Skylake-X clock for clock, watt for watt. Youâre looking at a downgrade for 99% of things and a sidegrade for SQL performance
This run of intel HEDT is Netburst Two: electric boogaloo.
It might be because of the fact that there is a GPU sitting right next to the CPU and itâs running hot so this impacts the CPU temperature as well, leading the CPU clockspeeds to lower.
APUâs are so durable. Had a friend that have no clue about pcâs in general, the person took out the apu og tried to re-insert it into the socket by forcing it in there which bent a couple of pins pretty badly.
Had a look at it, thought it was in-recoverable. Lo and behold, just bent the pins straight back and it actually works nowâŚ