Hi, I'm getting back into gaming after being without a gaming pc for over a year now. I have a laptop that I do some writing, coding and sufing with, but I need something more powerfull to play games on.
My dad gave me his old desktop pc that has a GTS 8800, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 2GB of RAM, a 240GB SSD and a 450W corsair PSU.
I don't have much money to spend (200-250€), so i was thinking about upgrading the PC. Either getting a i3 6100, a cheap moob and 8GB Ram (and use the old GPU till I can afford a new one), or a Gtx 1050TI and some DDR2 RAM.
Im mostly going to play Elite Dangerous and BF1 on 1080p in medium settings.
Is it even worth trying to use the old parts or should I just wait till I have some more money?
Thanks.
Personally I would say buy slightly older stuff, haswell or devils cannon. Cheaper, and not much performance difference comparatively to skylake, especially for gaming, and maybe a 700 or 900 series card. But you might also want to save up some more to get it all at once.
2 Likes
I personally sold a PC that was in every way more powerful than this one because it was just lacking in performance. I was able to just play BF4 at 1680x1050 with barely 60fps. You could totally just put a GTX 1050Ti in it and transplant that into a newer PC later on, which will give you some performance benefit in the mean time. If you can get your hands on cheap second-hand DDR2 that will definitely be worth it, 2 GB just won't cut it. Maybe look into second-hand for the whole upgrade, new generations aren't much of a performance jump. Just my 2 eurocents
Cheers
1 Like
Personal I would wait till you could afford at least a locked i5 because with an i3 your going to duel core instead of quad core. The only thing I would save from that build would probably be the ssd. Any more money you invest in to that system is kind of going to be thrown into a pit save for a gpu that you could probably transfer to a new system. The problem is you are kind of limited on choices of graphics card do to your power supply. I would seriously consider looking into the Rx 470 or RX 480 there much better bang for your buck.
3 Likes
Upgrade platforms, don't bother uggrading on the current platform. The performance difference will be so little for the price.
1 Like
there's nothing wrong with an i3 for gaming since it has 4 threads
2 Likes
I was in the same boat. I went with a 7850k cheap mb and 8 gig 2133 ram and used everything else from by old stuff.
For me it was a great
2 Likes
Not too bad an idea with AM4 around the corner
2 Likes
I agree with you @thijsiez, make sure @SpacePirateBill to get 8GB of DDR2 if your saving the old MOBO, you may get away with 4GBs but at 1080p I would try to shoot 8GB.
How many slots do you have on that motherboard?
1 Like
I've build a PC for a friend years ago. 750ti haswell i5 etc. and in 1080p he is still killing every game you trow at it. to be honest, in 1080p you really don't need much nowadays. on a skylake CPU you even can game like crazy on 1080p.
1 Like
i'd suggest getting a new CPU, Mobo, and RAM first. That will help you with all of your tasks where a new GPU will only help with gaming.
1 Like
Thanks, I found some second-hand RAM, it's 8GB DDR2 (4x2GB) for 30€, so I'll buy that and see how the PC preforms after that. I might be able to borrow a friends GPU to see if i can play anything, if not I'll get an i3 6100, new mobo and RAM. In the benchmarks I saw of BF1 the i3 was able to run without a problem.
And thanks everyone for the advice!
1 Like
You welcome dude hope it goes well, Get Dem Deals!! :)
Sadly they're hyperthreaded cores...
the i3 has 4 threads running at half the 2 core specs.
So a 4Ghz would run at 4 x 2Ghz at most, and that would be a BIG bottle neck, since games using dx11 uses 4 cores where one is fully loaded and the rest of the cores are sortta spread out somewhere 30-40% maybe, imo look up some AMD parts and see what they have to offer, AMD ain't shabby when it comes to gaming bang for bucks. You wont get 200 FPS on your 1080, and 1700 dollar CPU, but it gets the job done, and well.
*edit
And cheap
The APU's are glorious bang for bucks atleast(Especially with the low priced 2400Mhz ram available now a days). Got one connected to my TV atm, and it dominates anything the consoles has to offer.
1 Like
A quick look at one of the newest AAA titles puts an i3 at 90+ fps in battlefield 1
also not sure that's really how the cores/threads work...that is kind of how it would work for a quad core i5 at 2ghz vs a dual core at 4ghz in 100% properly multi-threaded applications
but a hyperthreaded thread seems to be about 50% efficient as having a real thread
and most games still put a majority of the workload onto Core 0 of the CPU, meaning the one running at 4ghz for an i3, making it have plenty of performance for games, and it gives you 4 threads for games that require 4 threads
