Upgrading an old(ish) Gaming PC.

[a311]

Hello all,

I was weighing up getting a PS5 recently but then recalled my old gaming PC was up in the loft. I built it myself aprox 8 plus years ago at a rough guess. Then we had kids and my man cave became a kids playroom which really was just the biggest cupboard in the house piled high with their toys and other ste.

They're a bit older now so I'm reclaiming the room which will double up as a TV and gaming room. Before buying a PS5 I wanted to see if it was viable to upgrade the PC or not. In those fallow years I've still had a gaming laptop, I mostly play strategy games which it copes with fine.

I'm very out of the loop when it comes to specs etc. I've retrieved it from the loft this morning and the good news is it works. Only after realising I was plugging the HDMI into a motherboard port rather than the graphics card.....

Specs are below. I guess worse case I can use the shell power supply if I need to upgrade the GPU and motherboard?

Intel i5-3570K CPU

Samsung SSD 500 GB

2TB standard drive

Xfx r7900 series ghost (A Google of this suggests it was realesed late 2011).

Motherboard is a sabretooth Z77.

So the question is can I do anything with this or confine it back to the loft or one of the kids to use and start from scratch?

[gotoPzero]

Bang 32gb of ram in it and get the best used gfx card that the psu will support?

[a311]

So it really is old. Running Windows 7 which is dead

Is there an online configuration tool that might tell me what's use able and compatible?

[Motorman74]

It depends entirely on what you want to play with it.

If you want to play the latest AAA titles, a 4 core 4 thread i5 is always going to be a pretty bad bottle neck, as is DDR3 RAM.

If you have less demanding titles in mind then a GPU upgrade might be feasible for now, and something you could take forward with you if you later upgraded the platform.

[Funk]

I've been in a similar-ish position - older PC but running perfectly on W10 but every upgrade means I'm just moving a bottleneck. I think there has to come a point with older kit that you have to say by the time you've upgraded as far as you can with backward compatible components in an 8+ year old PC, you'd probably have done better to just cut over to a whole new machine where you have equilibrium and probably a good degree of forward compatibility in future.

[a311]

Motorman74 said:

It depends entirely on what you want to play with it.

If you want to play the latest AAA titles, a 4 core 4 thread i5 is always going to be a pretty bad bottle neck, as is DDR3 RAM.

If you have less demanding titles in mind then a GPU upgrade might be feasible for now, and something you could take forward with you if you later upgraded the platform.

Cheers. I haven't had a console since a PS3. I tended play the total war series on the PC and other strategy type games-these run fine on the laptop still so for that I don't need anything mega. If I were to get a new GPU and CPU would that be doable with the exisiting motherboard and power supply? I guess I could spend the PS5 budget plus a few hundred if that would get me a PS5 alternative plus an improvement for the exisiting games I play through Steam.

[a311]

Funk said:

I've been in a similar-ish position - older PC but running perfectly on W10 but every upgrade means I'm just moving a bottleneck. I think there has to come a point with older kit that you have to say by the time you've upgraded as far as you can with backward compatible components in an 8+ year old PC, you'd probably have done better to just cut over to a whole new machine where you have equilibrium and probably a good degree of forward compatibility in future.

In true impulse fashion I ended up deciding together a system on Scan for ~£1300 all in. I went for the whole shebang rather than risking individual components not being compatible when the rest arrives. PSU might have been usable but aren't that expensive.

Here's the specs:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 8 Core

GPU Sapphire 7800 XT PULSE 16GB

CPU AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Motherboard ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI

Othet than than a decent SSD, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM.

Hopefully as straight forward as I remember putting the last one together.

[gotoPzero]

If it helps offset the cost a bit if you are stripping the old machine the Sabretooth mobos sell for good money on ebay.

[Griffith4ever]

Maybe use the PSU and case, and def the 500Gb SSD. Bin/ebay the rest. You'd be amazed how slow a 3rd gen i5 is compared to 12/13th gen

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i...

I'd just start again.

I recently upgraded my PC which I thought was "fine". It had a top end 2nd gen i7. I've put a 12th gen i5 in and it runs circles round it, even before we look at the GPU

[Funk]

a311 said:

Funk said:

I've been in a similar-ish position - older PC but running perfectly on W10 but every upgrade means I'm just moving a bottleneck. I think there has to come a point with older kit that you have to say by the time you've upgraded as far as you can with backward compatible components in an 8+ year old PC, you'd probably have done better to just cut over to a whole new machine where you have equilibrium and probably a good degree of forward compatibility in future.

In true impulse fashion I ended up deciding together a system on Scan for ~£1300 all in. I went for the whole shebang rather than risking individual components not being compatible when the rest arrives. PSU might have been usable but aren't that expensive.

Here's the specs:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 8 Core

GPU Sapphire 7800 XT PULSE 16GB

CPU AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Motherboard ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI

Othet than than a decent SSD, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM.

Hopefully as straight forward as I remember putting the last one together.

Nice! I would've replaced the PSU too - they wear out with time like anything else and a stable power supply is important.

[mmm-five]

a311 said:

In true impulse fashion I ended up deciding together a system on Scan for ~£1300 all in. I went for the whole shebang rather than risking individual components not being compatible when the rest arrives. PSU might have been usable but aren't that expensive.

Here's the specs:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 8 Core

GPU Sapphire 7800 XT PULSE 16GB

CPU AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Motherboard ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI

Othet than than a decent SSD, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM.

Hopefully as straight forward as I remember putting the last one together.

That sounds very good value...what speed RAM, m.2, PSU and what cooler did you go for?

[captain_cynic]

a311 said:

In true impulse fashion I ended up deciding together a system on Scan for ~£1300 all in. I went for the whole shebang rather than risking individual components not being compatible when the rest arrives. PSU might have been usable but aren't that expensive.

Here's the specs:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 8 Core

GPU Sapphire 7800 XT PULSE 16GB

CPU AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Motherboard ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI

Othet than than a decent SSD, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM.

Hopefully as straight forward as I remember putting the last one together

If you wanted to save a few quid, consider the Ryzen 5 processors.

I've the precious generation of that motherboard (B550) and they're brilliant. I've mine paired with a Ryzen 5 5600x. I expect that my GTX 3070 will show it's age long before the CPU.

Maybe a new M2 SSD as well, storage eis still pretty cheap.

[a311]

mmm-five said:

That sounds very good value...what speed RAM, m.2, PSU and what cooler did you go for?

RAM is x2 DDR5 Corrsair vengeance.

PSU is montech gs 750

Cooler is an artic freeze.

It all looks pretty lazy with leds on everything.

It's been a pig to build today. It started well and I think I'm there but the case to motherboard connections had me scratching my head for a while. The PSU wasn't modular on the last build I did and the connections all seemed more fool proof. This time around for the motherboard it's got a 6 pin socket but only 4 pin blocks supplied so one just over hangs. Same one of the tower fans basically a 3 pin connector on a 4 pin slot on the MB. I could have saved myself some time if I knew that beforehand.


Then on boot I was get a RAM error light on the MB. Took them out several times, changed channels etc and no luck. Eventually on about the 10th time of re seating them it seemed to do the trick. Booting windows can wait until tomorrow although on the bios screen I'm getting a cpu cooler error message the fan is running and the idol temp has been stable so hopefully it's nothing that needs me to take anything apart again......

[a311]

captain_cynic said:

If you wanted to save a few quid, consider the Ryzen 5 processors.

I've the precious generation of that motherboard (B550) and they're brilliant. I've mine paired with a Ryzen 5 5600x. I expect that my GTX 3070 will show it's age long before the CPU.

Maybe a new M2 SSD as well, storage eis still pretty cheap.

I think it's a fairly mid level system all in. I could have doubled the cost on the GPU but hopefully it will do what I want it to and more.

I'll post some pics tomorrow.

[BlueMR2]

a311 said:

I'm getting a cpu cooler error message the fan is running and the idol temp has been stable so hopefully it's nothing that needs me to take anything apart again......

It may not be in the main cpu fan slot, so it may think that has gone down.

[.:ian:.]

a311 said:

In true impulse fashion I ended up deciding together a system on Scan for ~£1300 all in. I went for the whole shebang rather than risking individual components not being compatible when the rest arrives. PSU might have been usable but aren't that expensive.

Here's the specs:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 7800X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 8 Core

GPU Sapphire 7800 XT PULSE 16GB

CPU AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Motherboard ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS WIFI

Othet than than a decent SSD, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM.

Hopefully as straight forward as I remember putting the last one together.

That's decent spec, I got a 7800xt last year, seemed to be a good alternative to a 4070 if you don't want Ray tracing, it's nearly as fast as a 4070ti but costs the same as a plain 4070.

Certainly runs everything I've thrown at it, even on my ultrawide monitor.

[a311]

With it all up and firing I'm impressed so far. Naturally it plays some of the older games I like better than the laptop.

Newer stuff looks great through the TV. Something is a miss with the wi-fi that I need to sort out plus the Bluetooth mouse I got doesn't seem to work but does with my laptop-I recall when building one of the USB connections was pretty loose however the mouse in dongle-less but the wireless keyboard and gaming controller I got which do have dongles work fine.

I may need to get another SSD as I've installed almost 1 TB of games so far lol.

[BlueMR2]

https://www.asus.com/uk/support/faq/1050953/

You need to check its enabled in the bios, this has a walkthrough on the ASUS site you could follow.

[a311]

BlueMR2 said:

https://www.asus.com/uk/support/faq/1050953/

You need to check its enabled in the bios, this has a walkthrough on the ASUS site you could follow.

Thanks will take a look at that.