- 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. (upbeat music) - Imagine this is your gaming rig. It cost you about, I
dunno, $1800 at the time. And features premium
parts like a Core i7 3770K and a Radeon HD 7970. 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 HD 7970, and eight gigabytes of DDR3 in here. So while it's not screaming fast, it was 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 6700HQ 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. Well that's fine. Let's go ahead and do some
transcoding with HandBrake. Got a file in here. And that is our low play 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 to the system as well. So let's try copying stuff
to and from the network. We've got a gigabit NIC in here. I'll use MONIC, 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 its within about
three seconds in each direction. That's not too bad considering we've got about 500 megabytes worth of files, or 85 files total. They're just large photos. I dunno, let's load up a video. Okay, that's 1080p. 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
wanna 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 hoo! 33 FPS average with 106 FPS maximum. Thing is, newer hardware brings
improvements to the table other than higher speeds and more cores. Thunderbolt and 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, hoo, 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 SuperSpeed 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 choices 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 era use mini-PCI Express for Wifi, 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 in it goes. If you don't need Wifi, a 2.5 gigabit network card like this guy will cost you about $50 or less and have 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've killed for USB Type C back when this thing was new. So it's been a few days, a few weeks, 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 Wifi and see if that performs about as well as we'd expect. So right now we're connected
to our five gigahertz Wifi. 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 Wifi adapter and also that your Wifi
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 Wifi 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 $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 gaming. 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 it'll 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've been fine right up to 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. It'll dual channel and get
us a little extra oomph. And 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 megs 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 that we're making here is that you can add as
much capacity as you want as long as you've got
available SATA ports. And 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 target in 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. Ugh! 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. We've got Doom Eternal on here. - [David] Doom Eternal! - I wonder what people who add us to the friends list on Steam actually think they're
going to accomplish? Do they just wanna have their name show up in the video
for like, half a second? All right, let's see what
settings we have, oh? Aw. Older CPUs like this kinda 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
(laughs) 640 by 480. I'm sorry. Blur off, performance
metrics, let's throw that on, Ultra Nightmare, no resolution scaling. So yeah, this'll just be 1080p. Look at that, 260 FPS. That's pretty smooth. Oh. (sighs) 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. 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 dunno what else there
is to say about it. It's perfectly playable. If this is not 60 FPS then it
very much looks like it is. Anyway. Let's try something else then. So I dunno, 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 baseline because Ryzen is definitely
going to cream this as far as CPU goes. But with GPU rendering, especially with Blender's
new OptiX renderer, 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 OptiX. 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, the Ryzen 3 third gen. And it's not a particularly complex edit but it is a full LTT video edit and I can kinda scrub
through it pretty quickly. This is stuff that comes from the C200, but 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. Hm, maybe it's a combo of both. CPU may be the bottleneck there. GPU certainly is not. 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'd 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 GPU's 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 and 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 of years. That being said, for some people they're still gonna 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, - Thanks for watching guys. Check out our 10 years
of gaming PCs series. It really puts things into perspective, that a machine this old
can still be usable today.
Is my Pentium 4 still fine ?
That wasn't the greatest show case of using older handware I've seen but yes you should try smaller upgrades before going all out.
This video got me mulling over my Php30,000 (US$600) Acer Aspire ZC-605 (it wasn't a 602, sorry) and how I can replace it with something hella more powerful for the same dough (or max 200 dollars more if I want to keep the "all-in-one" form factor).
My most demanding benchmark is Bricklink's Stud.io native renderer, which rendered this LDD-built model (image link is not the actual Stud.io render) in my freshly-fixed system in 40 minutes. I'm pretty sure current-gen CPUs and GPUs can render that in 60 seconds on default settings.
My Intel i7 3820 Sandy Bridge system agrees. 16gb, 2x500gb ssd, GTX 1070