Upgrading an old machine

[ScarecrowVII]

Budget (including currency): 500-1000 USD (very flexible)

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Primary: Gaming (mostly single player offline RPGs like Elden Ring, Tomb Raider, Control, etc. some RTS and some flight sim), Secondary: light CAD, programming

 

Other details: 

 

Hello,

I have a "slightly" dated machine that I have used and upgraded for years. I think I'm at the end of its upgrade path, but i wanted to throw it up on the forum to see if anyone had some creative ideas for improvements before I bite the bullet and start from scratch. Partially I'm avoiding replacing it due to nostalgia, but, if I end building a whole new machine the budget will be higher than listed here. If i have to replace the motherboard and CPU, I'm considering that a full rebuild and if I do go that route I'll create a separate post. I'm comfortable modifying electronics down to the the component level if needed and if its worth the effort (id rather not re-flow BGAs but i can if i have too). I would like to stick to air cooling as much as possible. At this point I would normally just upgrade the GPU, but I don't think that's my bottleneck anymore. For example I can't boot age of empires 4 because I'm missing instruction sets on my CPU (not expecting to fix that one).

 

Current hardware.

Motherboard: ASUS X58 P6X58D-E

CPU: Xeon x5675 (overclocked to 3.4ish GHz) these are ~$30-40 on eBay so i can break a few if needed. I also have the i7 950 it replaced around somewhere

RAM: 24GB 3 channel DDR3 various manufacturers (over clocked)

GPU: ASUS ROG GTX 1070 OC edition (then overclocked some more by me)

Boot Drive: 1TB Samsung EVO 860

PSU: i have a 650W supply in the system, but i have access to a 850W Dark Power 12 if needed

 

All of the overclocking is fairly light and I didn't push anything I thought might limit the lifespan of the part, but, at this point I'm not sure how much lifespan matters.

Overall, the system is shockingly stable and runs a lot of relatively modern games fairly well at 2K@60Hz and medium to high graphics, but I'm starting to see the performance limits on some of the more demanding games

Anyway, I'm interested to see what this community comes up with.

Thanks in advance

 

[filpo]

22 minutes ago, ScarecrowVII said:

Current hardware.

Motherboard: ASUS X58 P6X58D-E

CPU: Xeon x5675 (overclocked to 3.4ish GHz) these are ~$30-40 on eBay so i can break a few if needed. I also have the i7 950 it replaced around somewhere

RAM: 24GB 3 channel DDR3 various manufacturers (over clocked)

GPU: ASUS ROG GTX 1070 OC edition (then overclocked some more by me)

Boot Drive: 1TB Samsung EVO 860

PSU: i have a 650W supply in the system, but i have access to a 850W Dark Power 12 if needed

I would start by keeping the gpu and psu as their still very respectable nowadays. I would go for this (if you wanna keep your current case). What case do you have btw?

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XPrzBj

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 3.4 GHz 8-Core Processor  ($289.27 @ Amazon) 
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE WHITE ARGB 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler  ($39.90 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2 ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($159.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory  ($67.98 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($69.98 @ Amazon) 
Total: $627.12
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-04 09:48 EDT-0400