 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 costs you about, I don't know, $1,800 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 HD 7970 and eight 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 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 load 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 NIC in here. I'll use Monarch, 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 the 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 files total. They're just large photos. I don't know. 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 want to call that pegged, but this is 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, oh, 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 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, 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 port. For our 16 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 mini 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 in 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, 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 Wi-Fi and see if that performs about as well as we'd expect. So right now we're connected to our 5 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 dollars 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 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 RAM. DDR3 1866. We'll enable dual channel and get us a little extra oomph. Get subscribed 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... What are 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 Doom Eternal on here. 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 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, 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 640 by 480. I'm sorry. Blur off, performance metrics. Let's throw that on Ultra Nightmare. No resolution scaling. So yeah, this will just be 1080p. Look at that. 260 FPS. That's pretty smooth. Oh. Of course. If 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. You 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. If this is not 60 FPS, 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 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 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. The Ryzen 3 3rd gen. And it's not a particularly complex edit, but it is a full LTT 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 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 a 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 of 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 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 of 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.