Anyone else gaming on older hardware?

Joined
Jun 15, 2018
Messages
7
Good morning,

I have been out of computers for several years, i remember first visiting hardforum, and hard ocp in the late 90's. Seeing Kyle take a grinder to a pc case got me hooked, built several systems, got into watercooling/case modding, big into overclocking.

Fast forward several years and, its probably been 5 or six years since i even had a computer.

I pieced together this rig from scraps found on craigslist and ebay:

1090t
8gb ram
780ti
ssd sata raid 0
1080p panel
generic mechanical keyboard and a cheap gaming mouse.

I was surprised to see the frame rates in doom 2016 were high enough to be playable. (between 60-112fps @ 1080p on ultra), I have older games on my steam account and they run usually over 100fps.

Are there any modern games this thing should run at 1080p with the quality settings at or near maximum?


Sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but I used to be hardcore into computers and got out of it when my interests focused on building cars.

Also should I put anymore money into this thing or just start building an 8700k or 2700x system?
i'm just looking to play modern games at 1080p. And it would take me probably 2 months to build an 8700k with a 1080ti and 16gb of ram.
 
I figured these specs would be laughable, considering the 8700k benches nearly 100% faster than mine, same for my video card vs a 1080ti. If my system is not that bad, I will consider keeping it and waiting for the new hardware coming out in 2020.
 
Lol, I was running a g3258, 760gyx (4gb model) and 8gb of ram until 6 months ago and since then all I got was more ram and an i5.

Works fine for my needs.
 
Yeah basically a lot of games won't run on a Phenom 1090t today. Just go intel get a coffee lake 8700k you would be set for another 5 years.
 
Yeah basically a lot of games won't run on a Phenom 1090t today. Just go intel get a coffee lake 8700k you would be set for another 5 years.

I haven't found any. I built a rig for my little boy and used an old 1090. So far it's played everything we've tried on it. Granted I've not tried any super recent AAA games.
 
I haven't found any. I built a rig for my little boy and used an old 1090. So far it's played everything we've tried on it. Granted I've not tried any super recent AAA games.

So my rig might be skookum enough to last a couple more years when the next gen hardware comes out. I might buy another 780ti and sli two cards for the games that still support that. Plus I can get the watercooling lined out for this rig and transplant in the 2700x or the 8700k into the watercooling setup. Planning on going hard petg and bending it all myself.
 
I think my 1080 is a couple of years old now but is still holding steady.
 
the thing that pains me the most about this system is that its running at ddr2 800mhz and the gpu is in a pcie 1.1 slot. i think i could get a much better chooch out of everything if i buy a new board and ram, plus having an m.2 slot will definitely get me going. These are going cheap right now, and i might snag a $100 4590 as well and push this architecture to its maximum. I will need this to be a backup rig / lan party rig.
 
the 780ti is still GTX 1060 tier, thats what i own and it is very capable of 1080p if your CPU isnt bottlenecking, i am playing everything on very high-max with 60fps+ most of the time in modern games.
 
the 780ti is still GTX 1060 tier, thats what i own and it is very capable of 1080p if your CPU isnt bottlenecking, i am playing everything on very high-max with 60fps+ most of the time in modern games.
Right now i am seeing the same amount of cpu load as well as gpu load. they both normally run 80-90%. I imagine a sli setup will make the cpu the bottleneck and i will have to plug a 9590 in here.
 
So my rig might be skookum enough to last a couple more years when the next gen hardware comes out. I might buy another 780ti and sli two cards for the games that still support that. Plus I can get the watercooling lined out for this rig and transplant in the 2700x or the 8700k into the watercooling setup. Planning on going hard petg and bending it all myself.

I think it could definitely last til you can scratch together enough cash to get some higher end stuff. My kid's rig has the 1090 and a EVGA GTX 670 FTW and he's on a 25" 1080 monitor. He can play everything so far with little problems. I usually turn the settings down a few notches because he's 8 and couldn't care less about anti aliasing haha! Your 780TI is a much better card than my 670 so while that Phenom will bottleneck it, it'll still have enough horsepower to handle any game with most of the eye candy on.
 
I think it could definitely last til you can scratch together enough cash to get some higher end stuff. My kid's rig has the 1090 and a EVGA GTX 670 FTW and he's on a 25" 1080 monitor. He can play everything so far with little problems. I usually turn the settings down a few notches because he's 8 and couldn't care less about anti aliasing haha! Your 780TI is a much better card than my 670 so while that Phenom will bottleneck it, it'll still have enough horsepower to handle any game with most of the eye candy on.

Thats good to know, i'm on a 24" 1080 panel. I noticed I can run heaven benchmark and prime 95(small fft's max heat) at the same time and I don't see an fps loss. Seems strange, I figured they would plummet. Both the cpu and the gpu hit 72c and stay there when I do that though.
 
Thats good to know, i'm on a 24" 1080 panel. I noticed I can run heaven benchmark and prime 95(small fft's max heat) at the same time and I don't see an fps loss. Seems strange, I figured they would plummet. Both the cpu and the gpu hit 72c and stay there when I do that though.

Well like I said, that 780Ti was a boss card in its day and while it's long in the tooth, it's still got enough grunt to run a lot of stuff... Maybe not as fast as current cards but still plenty capable.

The Phenom II X6 1090 is on my list as one of the greatest CPU's ever. They could be had for under $200 for a long time, overclocked very well and was not only competitive with its more expensive Intel counterparts but can still be used today with decent performance.
 
My wife has an i5-4590, 8GB DDR3-1600, 8GB RX480, 180GB SSD, 1TB HD. Only thing she really needs is a 4690K but, her use case doesn't necessitate it.

I'm on an Athlon 880K, 8GBs DDR3-2400, 4GB RX580, 256GB NVME, 2x1TB Blacks.

We're both on 27" Dell 1080p 75Hz (Freesync) monitors. I just bought her's last week, she was thrilled.
 
the thing that pains me the most about this system is that its running at ddr2 800mhz and the gpu is in a pcie 1.1 slot. i think i could get a much better chooch out of everything if i buy a new board and ram, plus having an m.2 slot will definitely get me going. These are going cheap right now, and i might snag a $100 4590 as well and push this architecture to its maximum. I will need this to be a backup rig / lan party rig.

Woah, hold on a second..You are saying that the GPU is in a 1.1 slot, which is odd since all the AM3+ boards had 2.0 lanes with 16X going to the Primary and secondary 16X slot on the 890/990 platforms..Are you using an old 790 board? I am not sure they would even suppport a 1090t. Then I see you mention a 9590 and clocking that as high as possible...That CPU has a 220W TDP, and will melt the socket/VRMs on a TON of boards, even some 990 boards...Do you research, but if your current board is what you say, then the 9590 is a no no.

The 1090T is a great CPU. The superior IPC vs the first and second gen Construction core cpus made it very capable. I had one @ 4.2Ghz on all 6 cores with a WC setup. If you can get north of 4ghz with the NB @ 2.2~2.4Ghz then you would do fine even with a newer GPU, but as mentioned you basically have a 1060 with half the Vram and higher power draw. the cool thing about the 780ti GPU blocks is that they will work on some reference 1080 GPUs, so check that out as well.
 
Woah, hold on a second..You are saying that the GPU is in a 1.1 slot, which is odd since all the AM3+ boards had 2.0 lanes with 16X going to the Primary and secondary 16X slot on the 890/990 platforms..Are you using an old 790 board? I am not sure they would even suppport a 1090t. Then I see you mention a 9590 and clocking that as high as possible...That CPU has a 220W TDP, and will melt the socket/VRMs on a TON of boards, even some 990 boards...Do you research, but if your current board is what you say, then the 9590 is a no no.

The 1090T is a great CPU. The superior IPC vs the first and second gen Construction core cpus made it very capable. I had one @ 4.2Ghz on all 6 cores with a WC setup. If you can get north of 4ghz with the NB @ 2.2~2.4Ghz then you would do fine even with a newer GPU, but as mentioned you basically have a 1060 with half the Vram and higher power draw. the cool thing about the 780ti GPU blocks is that they will work on some reference 1080 GPUs, so check that out as well.

I am using an asus M3A78-EM board, it has the amd 780g chipset. The 1090t was listed on the supported cpu list at the asus website. I know that no FX chip will work in this board, i would do the 9590 with this board: ASRock-970A-G. I had planned on getting this board anyway, just to give my little 1090t a kick in the pants with ddr3 2400 and m.2.
 
I'm still using the rig in my signature....

It really boils down to what type of games you play.

Can it play Far Cry 5? I doubt it.

The most demanding games I've recently played were probably Fallout 4 and GTA V (both of which ran like butter with minor tweaking).

But honestly, I spend 99% of my game-time playing Civilization V, Grim Dawn, and Skyrim.

So clearly, I'm set..
 
I have a A8-5600k equipped with 950, if you call that old...

But, it does run Windows XP natively so....
 
i have an i7 930 with a GTX 460. I can play games from the past few years fairly well (Far Cry 4, FIFA 18, Fallout 3/New Vegas, Elite Dangerous). I ended up grabbing a used Dell with an i7 4770 from ebay for $250, and then grabbing a GTX1050 for around $100 to get a little more updated (and actually have a DX11 video card).
 
Yep. Sometimes you just can't beat old games on original hardware.

Intel P3 @ 800Mhz
512 MB RAM
Ati 3d Rage 32MB
80GB 7200RPM HD
Windows 98SE

Thing still boots faster than any other system I own. Even the SSD based systems.
 
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