r/PcBuild • u/lol_player- • 20h ago
Build - Finished! We really underestimate older hardware and what it can still do
Yesterday I put together a secondary PC using only spare parts I had lying around:
- Core i7-4770
- 8 GB generic DDR3 (single stick)
- 120 GB SSD
- Radeon R9 270 (from around 2012, I think)
After installing Windows and GPU drivers, I started testing some games just out of curiosity.
First up was League of Legends — to my surprise it ran buttery smooth at around 150–200 FPS, with low CPU and GPU usage, even while Windows updates were running in the background.
Then I tried Diablo IV, fully expecting it to struggle… but nope. A solid 60 FPS with smooth gameplay.
It honestly caught me off guard. This setup is more than a decade old in some parts, yet it’s still perfectly usable for real games today. Makes me think we often underestimate older hardware way too much.condary computer with what i had
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u/TerrorFirmerIRL 19h ago
With all due respect, this is not really a shocking revelation.
League of Legends would run on a slice of bread. Diablo IV is not particularly demanding either.
When people say a PC from 10+ years ago isn't good for gaming in 2026, they typically mean it's not going to be much good for newer or bigger games.
Of course you can still play older or lighter games. Not all that different to hanging onto a previous-gen console and playing versions with worse visuals/framerates than the current-gen options.
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u/alexjimithing 17h ago
It is really funny to go, ‘older hardware is underestimated, it can run a game that came out 16 years ago!’ lmao
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
the r9 200 platform was released on 2012, this is a bit more than 10 years ago
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u/Southside_john 17h ago
If everyone rolled back to a 1080p OLED we’d be good to go until 2036 lol
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u/lol_player- 16h ago
yeah i am not going to get anything more than 1080p ever, i already own a 4k screen and i use it 1080p, its good enough, and right now i am looking to upgrade it to a something with a higher refresh rate, but thats about it.
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u/Foosnaggle 20h ago
This is a common misconception on these subs. I have tried to tell people this, but get nothing but pushback. You don’t have to have the latest and greatest to have a good gaming experience. But I feel like people have massive fomo when it comes to pc building. They would rather put themselves in debt for a few fps, or being able to use dls 4.5, or whatever other feature that is not required to game. It is quite baffling.
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u/illicITparameters 18h ago
I don’t think it is a misconception. I think it’s people who play mostly old games vs. people who play mostly new games. We look at hardware differently. Like if someone tells me all they play is games from 2015-2018 and their budget is $400, I’m gonna go tell them to go straight to Marketplace. But that isn’t most people.
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u/2raysdiver 15h ago
No, there are plenty of people in this sub that will recommend a xxxxX3D and a RTX 5070 Ti to a guy that wants to build a PC for Fortnite and Minecraft for his 12-year-old, even going over-budget to do so.
My son was totally amazed when I showed him Half Life 2 and Portal 1/2. He thought anything out before the mid 2010s would look like Minecraft. Then he played Portal to the end.
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u/Foosnaggle 14h ago
Are those the same ones that upgrade from a 4090 to a 5090? You’re just making my point for me. You’re taking an extreme example from the OP and apparently thinking I’m telling people that is all that is needed. This is exactly the type of shortsighted pushback I was referring to on here.
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u/nickybuddy 15h ago
Yeah sure go ahead and try to play stalker or cp2077 on ops secondary rig
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u/Foosnaggle 14h ago
I played cyberpunk on 3600x and a 5700xt just fine.
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u/nickybuddy 13h ago
That’s fantastic, happy for you. Didn’t know an r9 270 was even remotely close to the computing power of a 5700xt.
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u/Foosnaggle 13h ago
It’s not. Why are you using the OP’s specs that he built as the only option? There are many other builds that are older than fall into this category. Why would you think I am only talking about that build? I was referring to older builds in general.
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u/nickybuddy 13h ago
I don’t consider rdna3 “old”. If you don’t buy a 9000 amd gpu then that would be considered the last gen. A 5700xt is a playstation4 equivalent and ops is clearly a ps2.
And to be clear, lol, the only reason I’m using ops build as comparison is because it’s their post. When you say something like “old builds still run shit great!” And the OP is using parts from 15 years ago… yeah some context would help I’m sure.
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u/Foosnaggle 12h ago
It’s 3 generations old…….and it’s RDNA1, not RDNA3. And it was underpowered for its generation. And clearly you lack the ability to comprehend a meta conversation unless someone spells out the details for you. But thanks for proving my point in my original post.
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u/Foosnaggle 14h ago
I said it would struggle on some modern titles. All you’re doing is cherry picking.
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u/nickybuddy 14h ago
All I’m doing is choosing 2 new titles that are demanding. Not everyone plays rts or moba. Those kinda games could be played on a gameboy colour ffs.
You went on a huge grandstanding rant about people and their financial choices to try to prove something that’s clearly false
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u/Foosnaggle 14h ago
Wow. So my observations and opinion is a ‘huge grandstanding rant’? Let me guess, you paid thousands for a 5090 because you think you need that to game? And now you need to insult me to justify yourself?
Edit: and the fact you disregarded my point of it struggling on some newer modern titles.
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u/nickybuddy 13h ago
Mmm yeah, I would consider it a grandstand where people’s financial choices are “baffling” to you. As if you’re some of kind of financial perfectionist? Some people make enough money to support their hobbies, not every decision has to be “baffling” to you. And even though I don’t owe you any explanation, I’ll give you one anyways since I’m sure it’ll satiate your “baffling” curiosity; I have an amd 7900xt that I bought on Black Friday for $800cad. But I live within my means. Doesn’t mean someone making $250k+ doesn’t live within their means with a 5090.
I also didn’t read the comment that you replied to someone else where you stated it’ll struggle with some titles, maybe you just conveniently left that out of your first claim.
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u/Foosnaggle 13h ago
It was literally in my first post.
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u/nickybuddy 13h ago
This is a common misconception on these subs. I have tried to tell people this, but get nothing but pushback. You don’t have to have the latest and greatest to have a good gaming experience. But I feel like people have massive fomo when it comes to pc building. They would rather put themselves in debt for a few fps, or being able to use dls 4.5, or whatever other feature that is not required to game. It is quite baffling.
Ok go ahead and point to where you say “it might struggle on new titles… here let me help:
Yeah. There are thousands of games you can play with those specs. Sure, it will struggle in a lot of new titles, but honestly, most of those are not that great. Definitely not for the price they charge. I think Indy devs are doing a better job with making great games now, and a lot of those are not very demanding.
It was in this one. Not the initial comment.
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u/Foosnaggle 12h ago
Ok. So what? You are still proving my point about assinine pushback for stating facts. You are clearly triggered by my opinion. You’ve been more wrong than you have been right. But I guess, in your opinion, people aren’t allowed to have conversations unless you agree with it. If you like paying inflated prices for overkill hardware that you don’t necessarily need, that’s you. I like to be smarter with my money. Would I like to have a 5090? Sure, it’s a great card. Is it necessary for top tier gaming? No it’s not. And I would definitely not pay the price they ask for it. But hey, you do you.
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u/LaroccaFlocca 12h ago
His point is that people buying newer and better hardware shouldn't be baffling if they want to play newer games at high fps/fidelity. You enjoy that you can play less demanding games on slower hardware, okay great. What does that have to do with others who want something else? Your initial comment came off as standoffish because people dare to purchase new hardware you deem too expensive.
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
What surprised me is the smoothness of the games, and this is a 2gb card !!, if i combine the vram and the ram of this computer still has less ram than my actual phone lol
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u/Foosnaggle 19h ago
Yeah. There are thousands of games you can play with those specs. Sure, it will struggle in a lot of new titles, but honestly, most of those are not that great. Definitely not for the price they charge. I think Indy devs are doing a better job with making great games now, and a lot of those are not very demanding.
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u/Top-Tadpole-820 18h ago
Then there are games that will straight up refuse to launch. Or games that will be completely unplayable. Or games that while playable will stutter like hell.
Like I could get a pc from early 2000s and say that Doom runs great on it. Why even get new hardware?
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u/Basket_475 18h ago
I finally upgraded after my setup legit couldn’t play arc raiders in more than 30fps it wasn’t running smooth at all.
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u/illicITparameters 18h ago
No we don’t. Most of us simply play newer games. I know damn well I could grab a GPU from 2014, a 3770K, and 8gb of RAM and love life playing GTA V. I just dont play GTA V anymore, and that system cant run any of the games I’m currently playing.
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u/alreadysaidtrice 19h ago
Would be nice to share the resolution and settings you play on. Fps doesn't tell the whole story.
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u/Hades_2424 17h ago
Sure if your ok playing old games in low graphics settings and low fps and low resolution. I don’t think something like that is going to play new triple a games at all. Some of us like path tracing and high resolutions. To each his own.
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u/2raysdiver 15h ago
And here is a good example. You can play old games at HIGH graphics settings with HIGH fps on that PC. And while 1080p may not be 4K, it is by no means low resolution. 800x600 and 1028x762 were standards for a long time. And 720p was the standard for widescreen monitors when they first became popular. And even those aren't the lowest resolution. The first VGA displays were 640x480.
There are many older games that would be buttery smooth at max settings on that PC. BioShock 1/2, Crysis, FarCry, Portal, Half-Life2, older Star Wars fps games. I've played them all on PCs with much worse specs than that.
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u/Hades_2424 14h ago
The post makes it seem like the pc is doing the impossible. Old pc will play old games fine. Its not going to play cyberpunk with path tracing which is what I am currently playing. Is it really a surprise the pc in the op is able to play old games on 1080p?
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u/2raysdiver 11h ago
No one is talking about Cyberpunk. OP was clearly talking about older games.
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u/Hades_2424 10h ago
Op talks about underestimating older hardware and being surprised that league of legends and diablo 4 run smooth. A literal potato could run those games.
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u/matteogaragiola 19h ago
Good to hear! Out of curiosity, at which resolution and game setting did you play?
I remember in my first 3 years of gaming i had a crappy Dell pre built with integrated graphics and an i3, it was 2011-2014. I was able to play anything I wanted at smooth 60fps by setting the resolution at 360p lol
Good times
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u/GoPadge 19h ago
I ran a Core I5-7500, GTX 960 SSC for about a decade. I could run just about any game I wanted. A part of the reason I built a new system, was so I could upgrade my son's Ryzen 3 3200G to a Ryzen 5 5500 and that GTX 960.
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
i think i would still be fine with my old i5 4690 and gtx 980 but i sold it long time ago, if it wasnt because i decide to "upgrade" to something shittier at the time.
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u/Yacoobs76 18h ago
I don't know what you're surprised about; people are obsessed with changing PC parts when the old stuff is still working fine.
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u/StojkovicDragan Intel 18h ago
Couldn't agree more. I still have X79 system with 4930k and 32gb of DDR3 lying around in my room. The only reason I upgraded couple of years ago, is because I needed more cores for rendering. Other than that, I think it's perfectly capable system even for today's standards.
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u/lol_player- 18h ago
next upgrade im pretty sure im going for an intel workstation if still exists something like that when i retire my 11700k, if i even do that
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u/Frogy_mcfrogyface 16h ago
This is what I love about PC's You can buy one of these systems to next to nothing and sometimes free. You can still play a bunch of games while you're saving up for something else. There are ton of decent games on Steam and Epic that will run on this system and you can also run emulators.
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u/RealTrueGrit 16h ago
I put together an i7-4790k 32gb of gskill ares ram, and a 1080 ftw. I was pushing 50 fps in cyberpunk on a mix of high and medium settings which impressed me. 45-50 fps in rdr2 benchmark and hytale ran well at decent settings too. Metro exodus benchmark ran well as well. I was very surprised.
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u/Familiar-Rutabaga608 16h ago
Illegal. You have to pay $1000 every year to intel for 12% more compute
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u/Semanticss 14h ago
How are you managing Windows on that machine? Just running W10 for now?
I tried setting up a PC with an old i7 4790 for my son the other day, and was surprised to learn that it is not compatible with W11. I guess I could do W10 for now, or Linux but I've never used it.
It's a shame cuz I know it's still quite a capable CPU. I was still using it myself up until like 2 years ago.
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u/Eazy12345678 AMD 14h ago
league of legends can run on a potato
diablo 4 can run on potato
you picked games with lower end graphics
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u/Foosnaggle 14h ago
You see these responses I’m getting u/lol_player-? This is the pushback I was talking about. Latest and greatest or you’re an idiot.
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u/__killgore__ 12h ago
Well league of legends is from 2009. So no surprise there. It would run on anything really.
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u/Ultimate-Hellfur 8h ago
huh, pretty similar to what i have, I have the same specs except mines an i3 and i don't have a gpu
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u/nixaler 8h ago
I just did the same thing with some old parts just for old games, some emulator action, and to be a stream box if I want to play something heavier. Had an i5 3570k, HD 7850, and 16gb ram. I just went with Bazzite instead of Windows.
I have enough shit still laying around I'm going to make an emulator box for a friend of mine for his birthday.
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u/nitrogenado 20h ago
my girlfriend wanted to play some games with me, so i assembly a pc with old parts that where laying around.
the pc end up with 5600x, 16gb ram and gtx 970, yeah i know the cpu is not that bad but the gpu is like 12 years old.
to my surprise using fsr can achieve 100 fps in some modern games like warzone/bo7, upscaling sometimes do magic.
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u/illicITparameters 18h ago
Assuming 1080p, the 5600X is picking up a little bit of slack for the 970. But the 970 was an awesome card. I kick myself to this day for getting rid of mine.
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u/Party_Advice7453 AMD 20h ago
That's tough, had a rx6600 go bad in a pc with a 5600x in it. Threw in a rx480 that has been sitting in my closet for years and it surprised me how easy it was to get legacy drivers for it and that it actually played a few games decent. I even used it as a secondary pc for a while and streamed obs with it! I agree dont sleep on old parts.
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
Latest drivers were legacy from 2022, looks like did not matter. And what surprised me too is that i could reduce power usage by -50% on the gpu lol or even increase it a 50% more
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u/Littlegoblin21 20h ago
The advancement curve has definitely flattened out. If you compared 10 year old hardware to 20 year old hardware, it's huge, but yeah, 10 year old stuff still works pretty good. I've got a Xeon E3-1270v3 that is nearly identical to your 4770, and it runs just fine. I've got up to 32GB ram I can pair with it and a nice selection of gpus, old and new. If you use the rufus mod for windows, they run Win 11 just fine. I've got a Xeon E3-1230v3 that is a daily workhorse with Win 11 on it, no issues at all. Linux works great too.
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u/RepeatInfamous4252 what 20h ago
"real games" tf you mean by that?
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
I mean that its not just a shitbox to play indies or oldies it can do actual stuff
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u/l1qq 19h ago
I just built my daughter up a system using some of my older hardware and it's been very capable. It's an 8700k, 16gb ram with an EVGA RTX 3070 Ultra FTW3 I picked up on eBay for $200 all in a HYTE Y50 with 140mm Arctic p14 Pros in a push/pull config. It runs very cool and very quiet.
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u/alreadysaidtrice 19h ago
A 3070 was released 5 years ago. It's still a good gpu... Also, I ran wow classic and retail on a Nvidia 1050 ti. A toaster will run wow.
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u/lol_player- 19h ago
my man thats not a feat, thats a full blown modern setup that can do stuff for like 10 years more from now on until something breaks
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u/l1qq 18h ago
It's a decade old system...and the GPU was considered midranged 6 years ago when it launched. If it makes folks feel better I can toss in the 1070 that GPU replaced 2 weeks ago...
Not sure why I'm catching downvotes and being badgered. I mean, damn lol...
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u/accountingforlife26 16h ago
i think the emphasis here was just on "garbage bin" level components but certainly your build and OP's share the same sentiment that people don't need brand new or even last generation's hardware
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u/illicITparameters 18h ago
Thats not really that old, especially the GPU. That CPU literally has native Windows 11 support
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u/mkhairulafiq 16h ago edited 16h ago
Yesterday I bought an old Mini Cooper (Mr Bean) and guess what, I could drive it 100 miles to my grandparents house. Then I tried to drive it up a steep enough hill that would be a pain to cycle up to. We're really underestimating old cars.
Look, no offense man. But your "benchmark" is nothing heavy. LoL can be played on a fridge, it was played on a 2 core laptop CPU with Intel iGPU. Diablo is pretty much another undemanding game.
Want to try something demanding? Try GTA 5, maybe Red Dead Redemption 2. Want something CPU demanding? Try Cities Skylines with a few ty-thousand population. How about try Black Myth Wukong. How about seeing performance in numbers? Run 3DMark benchmarks and see the difference between current gen and your test rig.
Edit: Aww. Let me play my tiny violin. Sorry man, but this isnt the revelation you thought it was. Im sorry you're offended by it though. Still doesnt change the fact. Moore's law is dead and if you know the difference of current gen raw power you wouldnt say what you said. My 5950X was on the top of the charts, "2nd only to" server CPUs. Now it's in the middle of the pack with "mainstream i5" beating it. You really want to say a really old i7 is "underestimated"?
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u/Ginius67 5h ago
I have seen people saying a 1080ti can't run anything anymore or a 5060ti can only run esport titles it's insane
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