Gaming on a 10-year-old BEAST of a PC

Building & testing a £2000 gaming PC from 2013 to see how it performed in gaming over the last decade.
Support Iceberg Tech: / icebergtech
The £220 PC I bought from CEX last year was a time capsule of what a better-than-average gaming PC looked like in 2012. In this video, I've upgraded the CEX machine to a more premium 2013 spec, using a 6-core i7 and a pair of R9 290X 4GB graphics cards in Crossfire, to see whether paying an extra £1000 and waiting an extra year would have paid off in the long run.
The Original 4K Gaming PC (CEX Machine V2.0): • The Original 4K Gaming PC
The Dirty CEX Machine (V1.0) : • Can this decade-old PC...
Music by Backing Track backingtrack.gg/
00:00 The 2013 CEX Machine 10 Years Later
00:43 V1.0 - 2012 Spec (i7-3820, GTX 670)
01:54 V2.0 - The Original 4K PC (GTX 690)
03:52 V3.0 - 2013 Upgrades (i7-4930K, 2x R9 290X)
09:28 Pricing - 2013 & 2022
10:00 The Benchmarks: 2011 - 2017
16:59 The Benchmarks: 2020 - present
20:28 Conclusion
A D S
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G E A R
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C O N T A C T
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#amd #crossfire #nostalgia

[@IcebergTech]

Some notes & errata: In true KZbinr fashion, I made a bit of a mess of the pricing. I confused myself somewhat, the original CEX Machine cost £220 but the screencap showed it as £230. The total *real* cost of the build was £492 ($586), or about £400 ($476) after deducting the old components. I also ended up cutting out a section where I explained about software and drivers, but I think it's worth mentioning. The PC is running on Windows 10, which is what CEX had installed on the system (after making some changes to the build the licensing watermark appeared, as I'm sure many of you are very annoyed by). Windows 8.1 would have been the "period-accurate" OS of choice, and of course Windows 7 was what most people would have installed in reality, but rather than change OS mid-video to accommodate later titles I figured I'd stick with the OS that was already installed For drivers, I'm using the 22.6.1 Legacy set AMD released as a security update last year. I considered using period-correct drivers, but I ended up giving myself only 5 days to make the video and a solid 40% of that was taken up with downloading games! I'm considering doing a "Fine Wine Benchmarking" video at some point in the future, testing out old vs. new drivers, maybe with a single R9 290X to eliminate Crossfire as a variable. Not sure when that's coming as I only just had the idea, but it will probably be in the next couple of months if at all.

[@Rex-tt1vk]

Fine Wine testing is a cool idea, also looking forward into future videos with xeons on a proper X79 board

[@tqrules01]

Maybe my old M4000 with my GTX 660 cooler on it?

[@koreannom]

A FINAL FORM GPU?!?!?! Maybe a GTX 980ti (or non ti)

[@theoneman6581]

A question ist the RX 5700 is still good its Like a rtx 3060 whit No RT Cores in my contry it cost 180 bucks

[@deagt3388]

Without the old man, there is no punch!;-)

[@anthonyk]

Mmmmm yes Cex

[@teamwts4375]

Tasty 😋

[@teamwts4375]

Pc

[@mike5260]

Cex machine

[@gaminglab4017]

😂 😂

[@therealstupidwaffle]

i love Cex!

[@AlphaMachina]

I had the HAF-X, 2700K, 16GB RAM, 2 x MSI Twin Frozr R6970X GPU's, with 2 x 300GB WD Raptor X 10,000 RPM HDD's for my OS. It was a monster system in 2011.

[@kaksidaksi3455]

i had a i5 2500k and a hd6950 and 12gb of ram

[@AlphaMachina]

Oh, and my PSU was a Silverstone 1000W. I still use that power supply to this day in my NAS.

[@AlphaMachina]

@@kaksidaksi3455 Nice. Good taste. I have to be honest, I bought the MSI Twin Frozr's because they looked amazing. Solid aluminum shroud with a big beefy heatsink. Those GPU's were monsters for their time. I still have one of them and it still works, though I have it on display on my shelf along with my R9 Fury, R9 390x2 and ASUS Strix 1080 Ti. Sold the other R6970X a long time ago.

[@kaksidaksi3455]

@@AlphaMachina Yeah i had a asus blower hd 6950 but it was so loud at 100%. It was louder than my vacuum. Our neighbours asked why was i vacuuming at 1am

[@AlphaMachina]

@@kaksidaksi3455 That's hilarious. I never did understand blower style GPU's. That kind of design should be kept to server racks where it doesn't matter if fans are tiny and loud. Edit: now that I think about it, I think blower style GPU's were better for SLI/crossfire? It pumped the heat out of the system, instead of the cards sitting there cooking one another. Could be wrong.

[@UNr34]

The 290x might be the best value card ever released. Still relevant today!

[@ireallyreallyreallylikethisimg]

Truly one heck of a plane

[@jayb2705]

They called it the "Titan killer" back then because it gave you Titan level performance at a much lower price. And with some 290's you could flash a 290x bios and unlock the extra performance.

[@MEGABUMSTENCH]

used to have one. really wasnt that great.

[@skivvywaver]

I ran one for 7 years. It had 4 gigabytes of ram when most other cards had 2-3 gigs. It was still getting driver updates when I took it out of action in 2020. I still have that video card for no apparent reason. I just don't want to throw it away. I wish I knew someone that could use it.

[@mrm90000]

For a hypothetical upgrade scenario, I'd either go with a 1080ti, or 2080, as both would have been logical upgrades right around the 5 year mark of the PCs life. Let's say in the theoretical timeline, you chose a used 1080ti right around launch of the 20 series for a bargain. Or you went all out and shelled out the 700 for the 2080. Or another possible, if you wanted to stick with AMD, let's say you waited another year and went with the Rx 5700xt. And since that card was half the price of a 2080 when it launched, let's say you didn't pay attention to the shift away from multi GPU support and splurged for 2 5700 XTs in crossfire lol.

[@AwSomeNESSS]

Could see a user upgrading to the Maxwell Titan or 980 Ti due to the decline of crossfire/sli, which I believe Iceberg has on hand?

[@c-valueenigma4977]

if you go up to the 1080ti, the budget king at that time was the rx 480 and 580 esp beloved by skyrim modders because they both have an 8gb vram version.

[@CrocoDylianVT]

The problem is the RX 5700 XT using PCIe 4.0, you'll lose like 15% of performance

[@mrm90000]

@@CrocoDylianVT the 5700 XT also benefits from having use of the full 16 PCIe lanes. And in 2019, we were nowhere near fully saturating PCIe 3x16... Even now, you can run a 4090 on a PCIe 3.0 motherboard and not lose performance (less than 10fps difference between pcie3 and 4, most of the time the difference is in the territory of margin of error), provided your CPU can keep up with it lol.

[@Nachokinz]

I can see a 4930k running a 1080ti well as long as there is also a ram upgrade; preferably 32gb to maintain frametime consistency so Windows is less incentivized to use memory compression and the swap file on the ssd. Would also help to have another ssd to store games on instead of a traditional hard drive.

[@Fernando-Rodriguez]

one of very few yt channels whose videos I watch through because of the presentation bravo!

[@Rex-tt1vk]

it's not about how well it aged it's about how cool it was on more serious note: Crossfire and SLI were peaks of 2006-2014 era pc hardware, and it's sad to see them fade away in all but professional solutions. 2xRX480 giving you more performance than 1080ti for half a price was it's last hurray in gaming market imo

[@lilpain1997]

Iirc crossfire 480s didn't even beat a 1080 Fe in most cases, barely beat a 1070. Let alone a 1080ti.

[@DewottC]

Video at 16:25 Might want to consider making a steam cache server for very fast local download speeds, after you've downloaded the game at least once to the cache. It basically downloads the game to a server (aka the steam cache) from steam as soon as you click download on the steam desktop app. Once the game has been downloaded once by a computer on your local network, if another computer wants to download that same game, it will download it from the local server(Steam cache) INSTEAD of downloading it from steam directly. So instead of your download speed being determined by Steam, it can be as fast as your local network/hardware allow. So you could even download games at 10gbs per second if you had the router/cables to back it up(Provided you've downloaded the game from steam at least once). It can be a bit of a pain to set up but I would recommend looking at a couple of videos talking about it, I think Linus did a video on it once or twice...

[@gamingreflections6476]

Hope you enjoyed a little bit of "you" time over the holiday period , you deserved it!. Given how well the crossfire worked in some games at 1080p I hoped for some 1440p results but I understand you have time constraints. Quality content as always 👍 Vega 56/64 would be my choice as a logical upgrade without spending silly money

[@hrayz]

My real timeline was similar. *In 2014 I got the R9-290, upgrading through trades to the R9-290X (was a blower, but a 3rd party Accelero fixed that.) Was still using my FX-8350 machine at the time, but March 2017 gave me that 8c/16t Ryzen 1700X. *Later in 2017 my R9-290X died and was replaced with an RX-580-8GB with very similar performance but twice the VRAM (that helped longevity!) And March 2018 saw me match it and go Crossfire. Many games could be run Crossfire with a little tuning, Vulkan and DX12 have "multi-gpu" which can work too (try harder people, it works a lot of the time.) *That Crossfire setup lasted me until October 2019 when I got a Vega64 off a friend. Exact performance of the Crossfire RX-580s, but no Crossfire weirdness to deal with. **(For a theoretical upgrade of the times, the Vega64 or GTX-1080 were the favourites of the time. AMD Fans could get the Vega64 with under-volting to do quite well, Nvidia was easier and worked out of the box.)**

[@redtesta]

Great video! Time machine, took me back. I have so many cases over the last 20 years. Sitting next to me , i used previously, Haf X but those initial components all sounded familiar. Very cool.

[@Honkinwaffle]

Have you thought about setting up a local steam cache server to help with benchmarking different games? First setup would take a long time but once you've setup a decent local library you can cache up as much storage as you want. This would help with the slow downloads issue.

[@igaovieira]

back then (2012) i had my first laptop as i went to university. Intel Core i3 2310, 8GB ddr3 memory, 500gb HDD, and a GT520M Good times. Played a lot of TF2 on that and some emulation as well

[@MiyuOSU]

Your channel is the best channel i've discover in 2022!

[@BuckyKat9999]

Great vid :) 2013 I had my trusty if 2500k, GTX 670 and 16gb RAM, medium settings all the way! I'm playing that Tomb Raider for the first time too about 3/4 the way through and its awesome. Over the Holidays played Arkane's Prey and completed it for the first time, loving the older games right now as can run them all ultimate!

[@dadgamer6717]

great video! love this concept!

[@rodhester2166]

great video. .nothing better than seeing what old hardware can do ..

[@rodrigo4379]

Really good video! I still use an i7 4970K with a pretty good OC (even though ove the years the OC got more ungry for voltage because of the silicon degradation). Used a 290X for about 7 years until I upgraded to a used ex miner RX480 8gb (actually is working great with a good OC for about 1 year). It´s pretty crazy good good the 290 held up compared to nvidia cards. Couldn’t be happier with my build :D

[@XxNewmilleniumxX]

Awww man, the beloved 670. About to shed some tears for the nostalgia. Outdated today but in its time that and the 680 was THE card to have. Those 2 would blitz through anything and everything, good times. 😔

[@whitebeartigtig]

I recently put together a 5930K/GTX 670 system for about the same as your 2013 build here. It's very impressive how older HEDT chips perform these days. The full specs of this build I've got is: i7 5930K 4.5GHz OC (on air) Gigabyte X99 Ultra Gaming 16GB 2400MHz Quad Channel DDR4 RAM 512GB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD EVGA GTX 670 2GB Signature 2 1500W Enermax Platimax Fully Modular PSU All I need for this build now is a decent case and a new GPU and I've got a pretty nice machine for around £500-600 in total. I think it'll be fine for at least the next 3 years.

[@mdwroblewski]

If you pair the above rig with RX6600 you should be sorted for the couple of years.

[@dodgydruid]

You should treasure that HAF, arguably just about the best cooling tower range out there, I have the XM and the myriad 240mm fans make short work of angry heat pixies, it is just a fan mounting beastie even if the front panels tend to be crap.

[@Latham06]

love your videos man

[@MrCriistiano]

This brings me memories. I still have my 1kW PSU that I used to power my bios modded overclocked watercooled R9 290 crossfire lol. Those cards were absolute beasts. I think they're still the only gaming cards with a 512 bit bus.

[@eee1200]

Idk where he founds the clips but its good he has good taste i like it i like him his a funny guy he has nice puns too :)

[@PwnHkr]

I'd love to see a final form of the Cex machine.

[@Dingbat1967]

Still impressed on how well these old machines work.

[@m8x425]

In early 2012 I upgraded my system to the 3930k with the RIVE motherboard along with a GTX 670. Happy that I got +10 years out of the system, but I upgraded to a Xeon E5-1680 v2 along the way. Overclocked the Xeon to 4.6ghz with DDR4-2400 RAM, and it has more than enough power to get +60fps with a 1080ti or a better card. One thing that really helps is to run inSpectre which disables the Spectre and Meltdown patches. I tried running an EVGA RTX 3080ti with my x79 system and it didn't perform that badly as long as the Xeon was overclocked. The framerate is stable with no real framerate drops, but the maximum framerate is blunted..... whereas when I tried running my 3080ti with an overclocked i7-3770k and i5-6600k, those processors got their butts whooped. My biggest regret was going with the GTX 670. If I could do things over, the 7970 ghz edition would have been a no-brainer. I upgraded to a 2x RX 480 setup but then got a 1080ti. With what I have seen of my x79 system and with an overclocked 4930k, I think 4k @ 60hz would be totally doable with a card like the RTX 3070 or maybe a something a bit stronger like the RX 6800xt.

[@UserRandomSenders123]

It’s mad to think for 11 years till this day I was running an i7-3700 with 16gb of ddr3 and a 1060. It runs most games on low like warzone but I’ve just finally got a new pc. I did upgrade my card 3 times. First card installed was a GT630, didn’t even have the X aha, the next was a GTX770 and finally the 1060. You can make little upgrades and still make old pcs work Great video showing this

[@Hemeltijd]

Something satisfying about old 6 cores finally getting to show their flair in newer games that utilize all of their threads

[@MiG21aholic]

I'm still using my 2012 build, has that same case! 1070ti and a OC'd FX-6100 still going strong lol

[@couriersix2443]

I had this same case using the i7-2600k w/ a Gigabyte Z68 mobo, EVGA GTX 570 (2.5GB), Corsair 16GB (4 x 4) DDR3 @ 1600Mhz RAM, a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD boot drive + 250GB WD VelociRaptor 10k RPM HDD + a 2TB & 3TB HDD (both were WD models as well) with a OCZ ZT 750w modular PSU. It was definitely a force of nature for its time. Aside from gaming, it was mainly used for doing an absurd amount of video editing hence the crazy amount of storage. The 250GB drive was used for importing/exporting video files while the bigger drives held unedited bulk files and games. I only ever replaced the GPU with an RX 580 later on (by this point it had been retired as a workstation, so I really didn't feel the need to go for a 1070/1080) and just barely migrated to an AM4 build like 2.5 years ago. Currently rocking a R5 5600 + 3060 Ti build, but I do miss the good ol' days.

[@lek1223]

the case is awesome

[@HANKTHEDANKEST]

I'm still using: -A HAF-932 from 2009 -An i5 3570K @4.5 all day, every day, mated to a maybe-slightly-bowed-a-little from the giant CPU cooler Asus P8Z77-V LK with 32GB of assorted performance (at the time) RAM -An R9 390X that happily runs at 1150/1650 all day, every day on hacked-to-run-on-old-crap brand-new drivers -Some HDDs going back to the early Obama years and a pair of Samsung SSDs (because I'm not a total barbarian) -And of course, the Corsair 750W PSU that's older than everything else and will probably outlive the rest And I gotta say, I'm pretty happy. Didn't think I'd be able to handle gaming on a 10 year old machine, but doing everything at 1080 makes it possible. The transition to the 4K era has been great for folks with potato hardware.

[@erichkohl9317]

I had one of those HAF cases once during an AMD period of my life. They were as heavy as they were cool looking.

[@rhysm.5915]

My friend spent $4k on a ibuypower prebuilt in 2010, I'll have to have a look at what components are in it. This stuff fascinates me. Thanks for the upload!

[@snapcount321]

It would be cool to see what a 2019 era upgrade to a Radeon 56 or 64 might do to this PC. I bet you could push this bad boy all the way to current day 35+ fps High on everything through current year - maybe even push 1440p ?

[@jasonandrews7355]

The D800 is the goat. I've had mine for almost 5 years, and it's still amazing, even a decade after release.

[@caloss2]

I ran a i73820 from 2012 to 2022, really got my monies worth out that CPU, GPU's over that time were 680, 980 and finally 3060

[@blackknight50277621]

290X is already 10 years old??! Holy shite I feel old asf

[@TKIvanov]

The machine I built in may 2012 was an i3 2125, 1x4gb 1333mhz (added another one in a few months) and a Sapphire HD6850 1GB. It was basically a supercomputer compared to my previous PC and I couldn't be happier with it. Lasted me till 2016.

[@jmac79ers]

I had a 6850 too, it was pretty good for the time but I upgraded to a gtx 660 to try to run battlefield 3

[@edricsantiago9490]

I chuckled every time you say CEX machine 😅

[@r3n846]

I think for the upgrade, a 1080 Ti would be great, also maybe some overclocking on the CPU too.

[@APARAT79]

I just recently retired my PC (bought around 2013-2014 can't remember exactly) with i7 4770k, cooled with Corsair H110 AIO on a ASUS Maximus Hero VII Z97 motherboard, with 16GB G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1866Mhz RAM and originally had GTX780, but in 2018 i upgraded to GTX1070Ti, mainly beacuse that GTX780 had only 3GB of VRAM. And everything was in Corsair 650D Obsidian case. This old beast can still run all new games on 1080p with atleast 60fps without any problems.

[@CBXweb]

Hey, shoutout to Green Ham Gaming, he's an OG

[@Fly_By_Gaming]

Hello Iceberg Tech, on the topic of high end 2013 rigs I just scored a 15" hp zenbook 5 with a 4800mq in it and 8 gb of ram in perfect condition For 10 AMERICAN DOLLARS, I also am going to add 16gb of sodimm I have laying around. That wayvI will have a davinci resolve editing beast onbthe go for this channel and my Tech Channel, (Which is good but nowhere as good as your masterpiece of a channel.)

[@Fly_By_Gaming]

Only bad thing is it has a 4000 series igpu (Which I had too many experiences with when I was a little kid) Eitherway keep up that beast of a cex machine.

[@reapzzer]

This brought me back to the best rig i have ever had the pleasure of owning. In 2012 it was a 3930K 16 gigs of 1866 RAM and dual HD7970s GHz editions DirectCUII 3 slot monsters in a switch 810 paired with a 240 gig ssd. Every single game in exsitence back then was demolished by this things. Playing BF3 with my mates on Ultra settings. Even though my current pc is orders of magnitude faster i still liked that one the best. (that 3930K btw still used by my friend in his main budget PC)

[@TH3C001]

I just never get tired of hearing the phrase “CEX Machine” said with what I assume is a straight face lol. As for the machine’s final form, the only things I can think of (budget and time permitting) are: -maxing out RAM capacity and speed that the board supports (overclocking the RAM or tweaking timings optional) -using an SSD as opposed to an old school hard disk (may not actually affect performance in games very much though if at all disregarding loading times but fps-wise) -finding the peak CPU supported by the board (or if this one is as close to it already, overclocking it if possible) -and finally, a more powerful single graphics card to eliminate the bugs presented by dual gpu setups (maybe a 900 series card or equivalent generation Titan card) -bonus, perhaps give Windows 7 a go. I read that for a time games performed slightly better under 7 than on 10 but this was early on when 10 was new so that might be ancient history now but if we’re also kinda sorta trying for somewhat period correct, well… Of course, all of these are offered with budget and time permitting. It all does make for a great and enjoyable video, but no need to break the bank on an outdated machine solely for content’s sake versus what it may make in KZbin monies.

[@daytimerocker3808]

what a classic case

[@rometherevenant8749]

That coolermaster case brings back a lot of memories

[@SlipperyStubble]

i built a GA-890FXA-UD5 with a water block swiped from a ud7, has 1090T black edition, Radeon hd7950, recently added 16gb of Timetec ram, it has two reservoirs two pumps four water blocks and the Thermaltake CL360. it benchmarked with the i7s of its day and is still a beast today

[@SimanSlivar]

NVMe drives did start to become available and the x79 chipset was compatible with them. You can use a custom bios flash to support nvme boot drives. It can power a 2080ti fairly well.

[@untitledotheflash2816]

I had a Sapphire Nitro+ R9 390X until a year and a bit ago , was a beast and still is , but have upgraded now.

[@anonymousaggregator5371]

Rocking e3-1230v2 paired with a 980ti. Still going strong. OS installed to a SATA SSD. Does the job😊

[@imsim6064]

I ran an overclocked i7 4790k on an ND-H15 paired with an rtx2080 super, 16g of vengeance gold in a maximums hero mobo up until 2021. Still a strong combo in my opinion and when i built it back in 2012 i was running the same R6 290x sapphire your running in crossfire here

[@Nachokinz]

I can absolutely see a 1080ti pairing well with a 4930k for its final form; as quad channel memory really comes in handy when a powerful graphics card is pushing that processor to its limits. Only other suggestions are that the ram is also upgraded to 32gb to ensure frame time consistency; the less incentivized Windows is to use memory compression and the swap file the better, along with replacing that hdd for an ssd instead for game storage.

[@mansoorshaikh5498]

I love old cex machines

[@paulrose319]

got a 2016 desktop that still works

[@100500daniel]

That reference R9 290x overheats like no tomorrow 🔥🔥💯🥵

[@Kim-fm2vo]

Great video once again! I do wonder though: what software are you using for motion interpolation? It's generating a lot of artifacts. I'd recommend Flowframes if you're not using it already.

[@IcebergTech]

I'm using Resolve's built-in optical flow, for convenience more than anything.

[@saturn_in_blue]

This is actually the year I spend around $2500 on a rig with a i7-3770K, 24GB of RAM and a first gen GTX Titan. That computer is still running fine now as a media and gaming PC for my TV (but with a GTX 1070 FE) though it's no longer my primary machine. The Titan lasted about 6 years before wearing out, mainly playing super-modded Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The Titan probably still would do OK today if it wasn't for something on the PCB just wearing out and the card losing 1/2 of it's performance overnight (which is why I replaced it with a 1070). 2013 was a good year to build a monster system, as many of those systems are still working decently even today.

[@evanmico]

Following the year after year upgrades, swapping the dual GPUs for a 980 or 980ti. However, for any real performance gain you'd have to put in a 1080ti

[@jeffreygrindle6396]

Mmmmmm always loved that cool master case thing has enough room for cooling to freeze hell fire

[@Lukson_PL]

You don't need to download Steam game every time you try to install it. Just make a copy of steam folder on external drive and then put them back to main folder after clean installation.

[@asOCiATE53]

Wow very nice content

[@martynadams754]

I'm still rocking a rig similar to this one (pretty sure the CPU is the same, the motherboard definitely is)! Recently uodated the graphics card to a 3060 TI. Still runs well enough, although I find myself mainly gaming on my Xbox Series X these days

[@ScarletKomi]

"Thatcher is dead" what a pleasant surprise in a opening of a video

[@HuntaKiller91]

I7 2600 and 6600 is still a decent combo as well for $250 today Glad to see this aging PC gets its limelight

[@grumpywolfgaming]

I had a similar machine back then, but I was using a 3930k with a single r9 290x, this was my first 4k setup. Only problem I had was the 290x ran hot as hell and I had to put a different cooler on it, which I overtightened and eventually killed in a little over a year :(

[@disadadi8958]

Lmao that from dusk till dawn clip at the start xD

[@RyugaHidekiOrRyuzaki]

Hey new subscriber here, love this video. Noticing the comparatively small % of performance degradation when jumping from 1080p to 1440p, is there a chance that Crossfire "scales better" to higher resolutions? My guess is while the instructions arent *really* parallelized any better at a higher resolution into both GPUs, the bigger frames do render "faster" or inversely, don't render too much slower. Obsolete tech, but interesting. Edit: Would be interesting to do a test with a single 290x and mark down the % perf decrease going to 1440p, then compare that difference to the equivalent difference produced with 2x290x.

[@matthewday7565]

Have you tried UBU (UEFI BIOS Updater) - it can apply the latest microcode updates (among other things), can also tailor the SATA/RAID ROM module and (with some additional tinkering to extract and apply settings) the VBIOS & GOP

[@IcebergTech]

No, I haven't! Might be interesting to see if it works

[@KitsuneVoss]

In 2013, I build an FX-8350 machine. I went through a number of graphic cards but ended up with a used GTX 970 which I used for a long time. A friend was building a new computer and I upgraded to the GTX 980 my friend sent me. Mother board had no issue with either one. I only upgraded the whole system in August 2022. Was able to use the same machine for nine years. I was able to play most modern titles up until then although sometimes had to slightly lower graphic settings.

[@commondirtbagz7130]

Nine hundred and one thousand series were the best in nvidias history imo.

[@KnurdMonkey]

I still have my x79 system (2nd pc). My EVGA x79 Classified supported no problem my 1080ti and i could install an E5-1650V1 overclocking it to 4.2GHz all core (6cores/12Threads). You could not install the 2***series Xeon because they socket 2011-V3 and the pinout is different. At1440p where the load is 70% on the GPU they are still very capable loosing very few FPS to newer machines.

[@eversong1996]

Finally you come back

[@IcebergTech]

Yes, it was a long week.

[@thefinalroman]

I don't know if anyone told u but u can use the radeon driver to force crossfire on and people make profiles so it can work on unsupported games. Also games like Hitman 3 have explicit multi gpu through DX12

[@MD_il_microcanale]

i7 4790k, 4gb r9 290x tri-x, 32gb ram ddr 1600 cl9, asus z97 hero and various sata ssds. I can play all Farcry (excluding 6, I haven't installed it yet) at 60fps with v-sync on, rock solid. try to play NFS heat, you can play it all at ultra at a fixed 60fps! all metro games, 2033, last light and exodus, run stable at 60fps at maximum graphic detail, only exodus requires the graphic setting just below the maximum available! the r9 290x was and still is a monster card!

[@RudolfSikorsky]

Nice PC, nice narration. Me too, build some of my ultimate dream PC-s back then. As student, never had money. And as my favorite games are in the past, it's satisfying. (Oh well. It takes just few beers and all those 2 cents of English grammar and 10 words I kno(e)w are gone.)

[@voteDC]

This isn't a million miles away from what I have in my MediaPC which is a i7-4770K, 8GB of RAM, and a GTX 970. However the motherboard in it has developed an odd quirk where only one stick of RAM will be recognised no matter the slot. I've overclocked it to 2000Mhz but single channel still loses me performance but as gaming isn't its primary purpose I'm okay with it for now. However gaming wise it isn't too bad. Spider-Man Remastered runs surprisingly well at low settings, with depth of field set to high. I do see the stutters you mention when I start playing but after a few minutes they seem to disappear.

[@opoxious1592]

I'm still gaming on my x58 chipset with a i7 990x (6 core 12 threads 3.46Ghz stock) at 5Ghz. installed 48GB of ram and a RX 6900 XT. Newest triple A games at max settings blazing at 120+ FPS

[@jacobwhittaker6241]

Literally used to run an almost ideantical PC for like 7-8 years. It was a e5-1650-v2 6c12t, 16gb of 2400, ga-x79-ud3, and a 980 ti. I run this computer till 2 years ago. now on ryzen with a 6800xt.

[@maxell7478]

2014 time, duo Gtx 980s show them the power of the monsters i still use today.

[@deagt3388]

Without the old man, there is no punch!;-)

[@raduque]

In 2013 I was using an E8500 with 6gb ram and a GTX460 768mb. lol. I upgraded to a Lenovo Y50 gaming laptop that got stolen from my truck and was replaced with an Asus ROG G751 with a 970m, in 2015 or 16. My sister still uses it to this day.

[@blutadlerx]

I am still rocking a 2014 Xeon 1231v3, 8 GB of DDR3 1600MHZ and a GTX970. (+SSD). It was enough for most games, and there are so many great old and new games, that run on max settings over 60fps. But newer titles like COD Cold war did run in low/medium on 1080p, with some stutter now and then, sometimes when I join a game absolutely nothing loads for 5 minutes and the game bugs around so much I can't even play. Same for Modern Warfare. Now It's i5 13600KF, 1TB Kingston KC3000 M.2 SSD, AMD RX 6700XT and 32 GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM. I think this will be enough for quite a while now, just because they are hitting hardware limits regarding the small size of Transistors

[@Ianator210]

If I may, the final version should be a 2014 version. With the release of Haswell-E and the GTX 780 Ti, that build has lasted me well into the 2018 territory without issue and once I upgraded to the 1080ti my biggest bottleneck has come down to single core performance at 1080p.

[@jacksonbtb571]

If you do a final upgrade for this machine, i'd upgrade the GPU to a single 1080 ti, and perhaps upgrade the processor to the E5 1680 V2 if you motherboard supports it. Basically it's a fully unlocked 8 core 16 thread chip that should be able to hit 4.4 to 4.6 ghz with the right settings. Obviously going from 12 to 16 threads might not matter for most games, but if you do test modern games that utilize high core counts then it might be worth it! Plus it would be fun to see the best chip of 2013 on modern games

[@Keullo-eFIN]

Did you undervolt the reference card? I had the non-X as a reference one and it got a lot better thermals when undervolted and I also could OC it higher.

[@bobekk]

As a i7-4770 owner i can say its enough for most of games 1080p 60-100fps low-mid

[@warth45]

That good old ghgtv build I missed that day :'(

[@anthonyk]

I would love to see some xeons being tested as a budget CPU in the modern gaming world

[@kravenfoxbodies2479]

x58 with Xeon x5660 overclocked to 4.5Ghz running CX RX570's would have a Firestrike gpu score around RX5700 / RX6600 in today's world

[@RC-pj1pr]

I had the 4930k back in 2014, with dual 970s, was a beast (except for that 3.5GB VRAM controversy!)

[@grumpyoldwizard]

I had a Falcon NW build with dual 680's, back then.

[@rmgaminguk7079]

I'd love to see a GPU appropriate upgrade. Selling my old i7-3960x I was going to pair it with a gtx 1070 as I don't have anything more powerful, but I think something faster would still be fine, eg. 2070 super or 3060ti.

[@Darth001]

Great video with cross fire. I keep coming back. Now do a build with a dell gtx 745 4gb

[@Suvaline1234]

Finnaly new video

[@Birbb47]

I didn't expect to see a GHG reference in this video, damn

[@BeetleBuns]

Just a note: SLI and Crossfire do not double vram, you only use however much is on a single card, because files are copied from one card to the other rather than split between the 2.

[@Mini-z1994]

Id go for a 2080 ti if you can get that running in this motherboard, performance should be pretty close too a ryzen 5 1600x which isn't quite enough too fully utilize a rtx 2080 ti but should still be a good showcase I'd imagine.

[@Rex-tt1vk]

With that new Asus IV Extreme and any of the overclocked 8 core+ xeons the 2080ti should do perfect fine without any bottleneck, Might even try 3070 that iceberg already owns or 3080

[@ismaelsoto9507]

I mean he has an RTX 3070 that has similar performance of the RTX 2080 Ti most of the time

[@laejxela]

I had a 3930K paired with a 2070 Super and as you say, it's a similar story - games like Spiderman Remastered / Warzone / Shadow of the Tomb Raider max out the CPU before the GPU at 1440p, but Cyberpunk 2077 was clearly still GPU limited, especially with Ray Tracing on

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

Darm i had this exact case and cooler... and i still have this leaf blower :D Granted, i was rocking a outdated 1090t Phenom II X6 back then in 2013

[@dmangamer]

IF you update this again i would love to see a Titan X CEX Machine

[@SA77888]

I REALLY like cex, its a great shop.