it's easy to get caught up in all the hype surrounding product launches you
know i mean we're usually the ones telling you guys what's so great about
the latest new widgets or in some cases what sucks about them
but not today today i'm telling you to put your wallet back in your pocket and
save your money for something else
imagine this is your gaming rig it cost you about i don't know eighteen hundred
dollars at the time and features premium parts like a core i7
3770k and a Radeon hd 7970 and
well they used to be premium parts only problem is you've been using them for
seven or eight years now and while they've served you well
the promise of a five or even eight core processor for roughly what you paid for
your quad sounds pretty nice here's the thing though
Intel's processors haven't really gotten all that much faster per clock over
almost the last decade and as great as ryzen is compared to AMD's older
offerings it's not a major leap forward compared to Intel's current lineup
either so by my rough napkin math your 3770k might still hold up pretty well so
let's get a baseline for how this machine runs today as it was originally
configured we've got an old SSD a Radeon
hd7970 and 8 gigabytes of ddr3 in here
so while it's not screaming fast it's pretty good for its day so let's start
off with cinebench yeah Threadripper this is not this
actually took like three or four minutes maybe closer to five not all that far
off from our core i7 6700 hq CPU which
is a mobile CPU but maybe we can catch up a little bit with a couple of
upgrades next up is blender this is usually pretty quick
eight minutes oh boy that's fine let's
go ahead and do some transcoding with handbrake got a file in here and that is
our low plane video load up the activity log
here so we can see how long it takes and go ahead and start
is that 25 minutes
it seems like our CPU definitely is going to be a major bottleneck that's
fine there's other aspects of the system as well so let's try copying stuff to
and from the network we've got a gigabit nick in here i'll use wanik our fast
server there's a bunch of footage in here let's just take this mp4
and copy it to the desktop that's 900 megabits per second respectable we're
about 100 megabits per second down from what we should be getting but that's
theoretical maximum actually i'm noticing something here while i'm
browsing through the network shares it's actually really snappy i mean browsing
directories isn't really a big thing but you do it a lot
so let's go ahead and try that file copy and see what happens
looks like it's within about three seconds in each direction that's not too
bad considering we've got about 500 megabytes worth of files for 85 to files
total they're just large photos i don't know let's just let's load up a video
okay that's 1080p it doesn't look like we're dropping any
frames or anything let's try 4k yeah
it's definitely chugging on 4k 60. yeah see it just paused there but it's
actually got plenty downloaded already that's the GPU struggling to decode all
this yeah the CPU is basically pegged the GPU is well i don't want to call
that pegged but this isn't really a great spotlight into what the GPU is
doing all right well let's fire up a game and see how that looks 29 31 32
that's 1080p high 7970 was a great card
but 33 FPS average with a 106 FPS maximum
thing is newer hardware brings improvements to the table other than
higher speeds and more cores Thunderbolt an NVMe support better audio chipsets
faster networking and greatly improved pci express expansion particularly on
the AMD side of things as for our old system here
we can't even connect modern high resolution high refresh rate monitors
without one of these and usb is even worse
we've got two super speed usb ports
and there's a header for two more in here and even more headers for usb 2.0
because most of this back panel is taken up by display outputs that we're never
going to use so you plug in a keyboard and a mouse and you're left with just
four usb ports here two of which are painfully slow
thankfully we can fix some of that now our old motherboard here still has pci
yes pci slots and we won't be using any
of those but we've got twin pci express 16 slots
this one here and this black one down here and one accessible
1x slot up here there's another one under the GPU but we can't really access
it now for our secondary x16 slot the obvious choice is a modern usb expansion
card like this one here this one adds two 10 gigabit ports and
there are options out there that have headers for even more on the back
bringing us close to newer motherboards in terms of usb let's pop that in right
now now some boards from this area use many pci express for wi-fi and that can
easily be swapped out but ours doesn't so we could use a usb port for that but
the 1x slot up at the top here sounds like a good candidate for that
so it goes if you don't need wi-fi a 2.5
gigabit network card like this guy will cost you about 50 bucks or less and has
the potential to improve network speeds by about 2.5 times if you need both
thank goodness for our extra usb ports we can expand that way
i would have killed for usb type-c
back when this thing was new so it's been a few days
uh a few weeks a little a little over a
month and a bit it's been a while
where was i Ethernet is only gigabit though which is
a bit of a problem for 2.5 gig adopters if you don't have the right type of
cabling or the right switch you're not going to get that 2.5 gig Ethernet so in
our case we're not really getting much benefit over our original gigabit
Ethernet controller on our motherboard that being said it can do it let's take
a look at the wi-fi and see if that performs about as well as we'd expect
so right now we're connected to our five gigahertz wi-fi we've got a 600 megabit
per second connection so let's just go ahead and disable the Ethernet
25-ish megabytes per second that seems a little
slow tldr it looks like make sure you get a
decent wi-fi adapter and also that your wi-fi connection is actually capable of
handling speeds like this so this number you see 216.5 that is best case scenario
and both ways it's not quite the upgrade we were hoping for one advantage we do
gain from this Wi-Fi adapter is bluetooth it's not something that this motherboard
actually comes with out of the box so having that is also a bit of a value add
whether it's worth spending the extra you know 80 or 90 on what we just put in
here is up to you but it's in there the thing is it's not
going to help us with our game it's time for some major upgrades now we're saving
a buck so we chose a GeForce rtx 2060
super it still packs a lot of punch but as a mid-range enthusiast card it's less
likely to be bottlenecked by our older system particularly if we want to turn
rtx on next it's time to talk RAM our single
stick of ddr3 1600 memory
it would have been fine right today but it's scraping the barrel now and both a
bump in bandwidth and capacity could make a big difference out goes the 1600
and in goes a kit of ddr3
1866. we'll enable dual channel and get us a
little extra oomph hit subscribe so you don't miss our upcoming video on how much RAM you need in 2020 just in case
the answer is 32 gigs we've still got two slots open here if we need them
finally our SSD now 240 gigabytes could get the job done in 2012 but today
that's like your operating system and the latest call of duty like have you
seen how big that thing is it's like 200 mags to 200 megs 200 gigs to download
right now anyway we chose the samsung 860 evo this is a
two terabyte model you don't have to go this large but the point we're making here is that you can add as much
capacity as you want as long as you've got available SATA ports you can
continue to use your old SSD as your boot drive but
if you switch it over to this or better yet install a fresh operating system
either way you can get a pretty nice little performance boost so i'd recommend doing
that at this time your old 240 gig makes a great scratch disk for projects or
backup targeting Windows using Windows built-in backup feature and with those
tweaks made let's see how it performs compared to
our ryzen 7 3700x rig here
this is our GPU bench and for those of you keeping track at home that CPU costs
about as much today as the 3770k did when it was new what
should i fire up should i do shadow of the tomb raider i think i did shadow of the tomb raider previously got doomed
eternal on here i wonder what people who add us to the
friends list on steam actually think they're going to accomplish do they just
want to have their name show up in the video for like half a second all right
let's see what settings we have
oh uh older cpus like this kind of had trouble
with higher speed memory like this all right so back at 1600 megahertz
memory looks like we're fine now so let's go into the settings here this
does not look like 640x480 i'm sorry um
blur off performance metrics let's throw that on ultra nightmare no resolution
scaling so yeah this will just be 1080p look at that
260fps uh that's pretty smooth
oh
of course you're trying to upgrade an old pc like this sometimes it's not
going to work quite as smoothly as with a new pc but as you saw it was running
really well i just need to make sure that i can
keep it running okay so i switched the RAM slots around
looks like we have some weak slots everything's fine now like objectively
this is very playable like beyond playable actually
it's been a while since i've fired up a tomb raider game pretty smooth
i don't know what else there is to say about it it's perfectly playable um if
this is not 60fps then it very much looks like it is anyway
let's try something else then so
i don't know let's fire up blender and see what that looks like all right let's do the CPU test first
this one actually should take a couple of minutes just to give us a little bit
of a baseline because ryzen is definitely going to cream this as far as
CPU goes but with GPU rendering especially with blender's new optics
render i expect it's going to be very similar
okay so that took a hot minute on the CPU let's see what it looks like on the
GPU with optics i expect it's not going to take very
long yeah 32.68 seconds basically the GPU is
doing a hard carry so what about let's do premiere so this is
the video that actually went up today as of the day we're filming um the ryzen 3
third gen and uh it's not a particularly complex
edit but it is a full ltd video edit and
i can kind of scrub through it pretty quickly this is stuff that comes from the c200 but i mean still high res high
bitrate files and i think mostly what we're waiting on here is the Ethernet
because we're only using gigabit right now
maybe it's a combo of both CPU maybe the bottleneck there
GPU certainly is not uh it is being utilized
network is like 600 800 megabits per second okay
so performance isn't quite comparable to our brand new pc but objectively over 60
FPS max settings at 1080p in pretty much any game is basically exactly what we
want and it's within about 20 FPS of our ryzen machine
as you might expect there are still some situations where you definitely want the
newer system like some CPU-bound games and particularly if you're doing a lot
of CPU-heavy productivity work like compiling code or transcoding media it's
also worth noting that even though we didn't test it today an older quad-core
machine will probably struggle streaming vr games Linus was dropping frames with
his old haswell rig even though he was using his gpus encoder because the CPU
just couldn't keep up and i'm sure there are other edge cases like this where the
new machine will make a big difference and there's more you won't be able to get
with an upgrade like this too Thunderbolt 3 is off the table and
horrifyingly there's no RGB
depending on who you ask that part may be a good thing there's a reason why
there's a blackout option in most RGB controls after all but
we were able to come at least halfway to the performance of our modern machine
in gaming while saving between 370 and
500 off of the cost of a new machine and that's assuming we're keeping our case
in power supply money that can then be turned into an upgrade for those parts
later on down the line better yet that's a case motherboard and power supply and
a CPU that won't end up in a landfill for at
least another couple years that being said for some people they're still going
to have to because they can't live with the security flaws and the performance
implications that those brought to the table but for everyday gamers and
desktop users well a little upgrade
goes a long way thanks for watching guys check out our 10 years of gaming pc
series really puts things into perspective the machine this old can
still be usable today