It doesn't seem especially bad, but that CPU is multiple generations old by now.. why not something new with DDR5?

https://items.gog.com/2023JUNE/REQUIREMENTS.jpg

Companies are struggling to get Games out that meet these Requirements,
they are struggling, because Bugs, & Glitches, & the push for Change is ruining
these Games.

There is also the push to go Retro Gaming lately.

Some Games do work with your Specs though
if you do end up wanting to venture into the Abyss
& try some Games out that may, or may not be good that is.

Good Luck!!!


PS: Ryzen 7 is the Equivilant over that of the Intel I7, which by now is quite older.

That CPU/GPU could easily handle modern games.

Using Ryzen 1700x and 1070TI I can run high frames in RDR2.

Limitation is that motherboard, looks bottom of the barrel. For a little bit more the chasm in quality can't be ignored, this motherboard is in that build because it's the cheapest and it's old. Looking at the downloads for that mobo, the original PDF update manual is from 2012. It was low tier in 2012. Cheap capacitors, cheap/no heatsinks. Dated and low quality, not much point to dissect that further.

Never heard of that SSD brand and not finding anything.
I'll go ahead and assume it has a really cheap power supply as well.
You don't want your entire rig to rely on some off brand power supply and ssd.
You want a Samsung or Crucial SSD with dram, and they are very cheap now a days at the highest quality.
PSU, you want Gold or Bronze minimum which will come with 5-10 years warranty. Corsair, EVGA, Seasonic, NZXT, Enermax Revolution, possible Cooler Master. Some peripheral type brands like MSI, Gigabyte, G-Skill have some on the market, and a lot of these are rebadged, but they often do limited runs which means there will be limited support/warranty. Always want to research and now a days there are so many break downs to get a complete picture of quality it's pretty easy to land on one you'll be confident in.

I'd skip this for sure, unless they are giving it away which I doubt because the semi modern cpu.
It's not difficult to build your own. If you're patient and pick up piece by piece you would get much better quality across the board. If you use reddit check buildapcsales daily and familiarize yourself with components and pricing. Black friday isn't that far away and that's usually the best time to do a build. Plenty of time to familiarize yourself with pricing trends and learn how to build a nice rig.

If you do end up building a new PC on a budget, the general consensus is that the i5-13600K offers the most bang for your buck at the moment, and it will be good for years to come.

I would go one generation up for the CPU. The Ryzen 2000 series is mostly a rehash of the first generation. Ryzen 3000 had more substantial gains in performance. I bought a used 3600 a couple of years ago and put it into my AM4 motherboard from 2017. Still serves me well in the latest games.

How about a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU ? Only used Intel CPU at the end of the Pentium 4 era .


edit: i hate the stupid RGB trend

Feels like 2000 all over again.

Remember when Java came out and there were a ton of Java demos, and they were slow as ass? Well, weak code plus interpreted language equaled very slow.

I'm going mainly off the 'weak code' part here because it is fairly normal for companies for newer hardware that's faster for them to take shortcuts. Hell, some companies back in the early days would just delay selling software for 18 months because faster CPU's would make their software look better then, rather than pay to optimize it. (Well, SOME companies anyways).

Been replaying the Dark Alliance game, the original one. Low memory footprint, simple graphical effects that were decent, a lot going on screen, running at full speed. It's a lot like putting a PS2 disc in of Disgaea and 10 seconds later the game is ready to play, compared to the load times of today and the GINORMOUS 100GB TEXTURES.

I do think there's a sweet spot, between good story/game, gameplay, and graphics. And the push for 4k realistic fidelity isn't it. But there was a ton of games and decent length that were in the PS2/Xbox/Xbox360/Gamecube range that seemed to be the right balance, of size, graphics, gameplay, and still have a ton of content. I miss those days. (And if emulators are anything to go by, the graphics card adding more polygons to smooth out models plus scaling textures does pretty darn well)

Though more likely if i get a newer more powerful TV it would be so it can decode and play HD video i've been converting to AV1 at full speed more than any other reason. Doubt i'd see a difference playing Skyrim at 4k vs 1080, even if my video card could do it.

Things have changed so much with PC hardware in the last two or three years.

I should probably have mentioned, Intel's published TDP figures are not entirely truthful, so you have to budget a much beefier PSU than you would think. Current gen AMD processors are much more efficent (the exception being that they draw more power when idle).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13544/why-intel-processors-draw-more-power-than-expected-tdp-turbo

Also, motherboard manufacturers are constantly trying to one up each other by funnelling more power to the CPU more of the time than their competitors, in order to leapfrog them in benchmarks. It's all so that they appear at the top of the table on hardware reviews, and so that they can get earned publicity from prominent youtubers.

Building an efficient system requires much more forethought than it used to.

I strongly recommend an M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 SSD and a motherboard that supports it. That is, something with a bare minimum of 3500 MB/sec read and 3000 MB/sec write. I noticed virtually no difference between my current PC and my old one until I installed the SSD.

Also, stated DDR5 ram frenquencies often refer to the overclocked speeds, and you have to buy a kit either for AMD (Expo) or Intel (XMP).

N.B.: Enabling the automatic ram overclock on AMD systems with certain motherboards may cause the CPU to catch on fire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/12yq4yb/megathread_for_am5_ryzen_7000/

Lovely....

Get at least a B550 motherboard. You want to be able to support PCie4 as a minimum (Pcie3 Nvmes are still pretty good though). Then, stick a Ryzen 5xxx processor in - the performance is so much better.

If you can afford it, a RTX 4060 gives you the benefit of DLSS3, which can help with really high spec games.

Of course, it depends on how much money you have, but I'd do the B550 and a newer processor at least.

Just be careful, not all B550 boards will be Ryzen 5000 series ready. You may need a Ryzen 3000 series CPU to boot from in order to update the firmware.

If it weren't a budget build, I'd just recommend a mobo that supports flashing a bios without booting (or even having a CPU installed).