DeadnightWarrior

As a child, I had a Commodore 16 (yeah I know, it couldn't hold a candle to the C64... ) and I remember enjoying some clones of games like "1942" and "Kung-Fu Master", as well as a very nice pseudo-3D platform called "Trailblazer". Then, some time around 1994 I believe, when I was already 17 years old, my father took home an old 286 laptop and I dove in the MS-DOS rabbit hole... First "game" I played to death was QBasic Nibbles, go figure! Then there was "Indianapolis 500" and "Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade". In 1997 I got my first Pentium desktop along with the mighty "Fifa 96" and "Fifa 97", both played for hours and hours. One day in a computer store I saw a dark, violent 3D game and I though "nah, it's too violent for me"... but still, some time later I bought a shareware copy of that game and... I discovered DooM! Hoy smokes, that was really something! I haven't been the same after that

Long story short: I've been using a Ryzen 5 2400G on a B350 motherboard, with 16Gb of DDR4 3200 RAM and a 4Gb RX580 for about 5 years. I never had anything to complain about, but I felt it was time to upgrade a couple of things. I just installed a Ryzen 5 5600 and an RX6600 (both "non X"), keeping everything else as it was: performance has DOUBLED overnight, in both productivity and gaming tests. I mean 100+ percent more performance with just a mid tier CPU and a mid/low tier GPU. And this is while using one of the "worst" chipsets to pair a 5000 series Ryzen with! Now, to be honest I don't remember seeing this much improvement, not only using the same physical socket but the same chipset as well. MAYBE in the Pentium II / III era you could have similar results swapping a low tier P2 with a high frequency P3 but that was over 20 years ago. A platform allowing this kind of uplift with two simple drop in upgrades after 5 years, to me is nothing short of amazing!

Mostly good old MSN Messenger, and ICQ a few years earlier.

I was actually targeting the RX6600 "non XT" (i.e. this model) which should be a lot faster than the 580. The games I usually play are quite slow paced, so I don't care if I don't always hit 60+ fps, as long as it isn't a stuttery mess.

I feel the 5800X3D is overkill for me, I usually play at 1080p medium / high and never looked for extreme fps counts... Of course, should I find one for a insanely low price, I'd take it in a heartbeat!

I have a Gigabyte GA-AB350-Gaming and it should support 5000 series with a BIOS update, according to the manufacturer:

This is my retroPC I built a couple of years ago: building, testing, scrapping, rebuilding and making mistakes on this project actually helped me through those painful times between lockdowns and quarantines. So, 5 mainboards, 6 CPUs, 4 graphics cards, 3 sound cards, 2 hard drives, 2 SSDs and a plethora of optical drives and floppy disks later, this is what I came up with: - CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6550 "Conroe" - MB: Asus P5PE-VM - RAM: 2x1Gb Kingston DDR-400 - GPU: Sparkle GeForce 6600 256Mb - SSD: Crucial BX500 120Gb (with SATA to IDE converter)* - SOUND: Creative SoundBlaster Live! SB0100 - ODD: LG IDE DVD burner - OTHER: Floppy / card reader combo drive - CPU COOLER: Itek Icy-100 - CASE: Tacens AC4 - PSU: Tacens APSI500 - OS. dual booting Windows 98SE + Windows XP (*= the ssd was too unstable and in the end I had to use a good old 80Gb IDE hard drive... ) One thing's for sure: it's been a long ride and trying to cable manage this thing was a NIGHTMARE! Still, I'm proud of what I've done so far

Budget (including currency): 500€ or lower Country: Italy Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Hogwars Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077 and future releases like Starfield; some light audio / video editing; office work; tinkering with multiple virtual machines. Other details: current PC is: Ryzen 2400G, RX580 4Gb, 16Gb DDR4 3200, B350 mainboard. I have a 1080p display and no intention of swapping it for a long time. My PC has been serving me very nicely for the last 4 years and counting. Athough I'm quite satisfied with it, I fear these newer games might bring it to its knees and that's why I'm thinking of an upgrade. Being someone who tends to keep his machine for years, I'm considering moving to a next-gen platform but I also think prices are still way too high. Right now in my country, prices for a hypothetical "cheap" AM5 build are as follows: 230€ for a Ryzen 5 7600, 180€ for a B650 board, 110€ for a 32Gb DDR5 dual channel kit. That's more than 500€ total and it's NOT CHEAP by my standards! I'm not ruling Intel out but prices are not that much lower anyways. I believe I have three choices here and I'd like your advice about them. 1) Swapping my CPU with a Ryzen 5 5600 and keep everything else. PROs: AM4 CPUs are very affordable; no need to reinstall anything; a 5600 should perform significantly better than my 2400G; it would finally max out my RX580 CONs: I'd be stuck on a dead platform; keeping RAM and GPU could become a serious bottleneck but then again, if I decided to upgrade them, I'd rather swap the entire machine... 2) Upgrading the core components (MB, CPU, RAM) and sell my 2400G/B350/16Gb combo for hopefully around 150€. PROs: new platform, new upgrade path, new features. CONs: with this, the RX580 would REALLY be a bottleneck and I'd still be spending a substantial amount. 3) Building an entirely new PC and sell mine as-is for hopefully around 250 / 300 €. PROs: it would be a shiny new machine, ça va sans dire! CONs: way over budget and I guess I'd get less money for my complete rig than for its single parts (you can check every detail of my current build on my profile). What would you do?

My bad, I meant DX8! DX9 was FX5x00 and Radeon 9x00 territory...

They both were indeed entry level cards and the Radeon wasn't worth it even back then, but at least the Ti 4200 is very highly regarded in retrocomputing forums like Vogons. It seems to be well balanced and very usable for DX9 gaming under Win9x and it still sells for around 40€ in Europe, so it's definitely worth checking out!

This is a TV tuner card, believe it or not. It should support both analog and DVB-T signals but I guess it's pretty much useless in 2023.

They do have a market among retro enthusiasts, you could easily sell at least some of them on eBay.

well, THAT's old for sure! It's a wonderful card for a DOS / Windows 98 retrogaming machine, one of the best of its time (2002 / 2003), but that's about it: I think it would struggle even in Windows XP...

It really depends on what GPUs you have. If they're on PCI-Express and not older than, say, 10 years, you could use them as emergency display outputs for testing purposes, or in old HTPCs, or maybe in some retrogaming machines. If they're on AGP or even PCI, I don't see any other possible use case except for retrocomputing / retrogaming PCs - this means you'd have to pair them with suitable and compatible hardware from the same period.

^^^ this. If AMD will actually support the platform for 5 years as they did with AM4, this is the obvious choice right now. I guess a Ryzen 7 7700 "non-X" would be a wiser choice, or even the 7600 "non-X", which should perform a hell of a lot better than the 2700 (despite 25% less cores).