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
[Music]
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 thread ripper 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 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
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