Calling all PC-building veterans!

[GenricName123]

Hey veterans! I built my first 1-1 1/2 years ago and want to know, 6-10 years ago, what would be considered a high-end PC that could easily play in [insert highest gaming res here]. Thanks!

[aisle9]

10 years ago?

 

i7-4790K, GTX 980 Ti, 16GB DDR3, 1TB 7200RPM HDD

 

6 years ago?

 

Dirty little secret: there wasn't a whole lot out there in 2019 that the 2014 system couldn't have easily handled. A GTX 1080 wasn't really all that much faster than a 980 Ti.

[Needfuldoer]

52 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

6 years ago?

 

Dirty little secret: there wasn't a whole lot out there in 2019 that the 2014 system couldn't have easily handled. A GTX 1080 wasn't really all that much faster than a 980 Ti.

6 years ago would've been Coffee Lake (8th gen) and Zen+ on the CPU side.

 

GeForce 20 series launched in Q4 2018, too.

[aisle9]

10 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

6 years ago would've been Coffee Lake (8th gen) and Zen+ on the CPU side.

 

GeForce 20 series launched in Q4 2018, too.

Eh, I stand behind my thoughts on the capability of a 4790K. If mine hadn't been killed by a POS Enermax liquid cooler, I wouldn't have replaced it until I came into the 8086K. If I hadn't come into the 8086K, I probably would have just held onto it until the R5 5600 came along.

[thrasher_565]

2014 quad sli 980 tis with 2x E5-2687W ASUS Z9PE-D8  v2) could do 4k and probly 1080p 160+ im guessing

 

2018 quad sli 1080 WS C621E SAGE 2x Xeon Platinum 8180? posably there a quadro thats faster? 2x Quadro RTX 8000

 

oh i guess there not good gaming pcs... well i guess depends on what you want to do...

 

Edited April 15 by thrasher_565

[atxcyclist]

23 hours ago, aisle9 said:

Eh, I stand behind my thoughts on the capability of a 4790K. If mine hadn't been killed by a POS Enermax liquid cooler, I wouldn't have replaced it until I came into the 8086K. If I hadn't come into the 8086K, I probably would have just held onto it until the R5 5600 came along.

The 4790k is such a legendary chip, an absolute unit. I used one in my workstation for years and it was a champ, a needed sizable ram upgrade and wanting to move to an NVMe-native platform got me into an 11600k, but aside from those things I probably would have been on that 4790k until Win 10 support ended.

[HumdrumPenguin]

I upgraded my PC at the end of 2014, where I got a 4790k, 16gb, EVGA 970 FTW, Strix micro ATX board, Corsair H100i AIO, Corsair 350D case. The only thing I kept from before was my sata SSD. I didn't really have a problem running anything on a 1080p panel. I remember Witcher 3 pushing the build to the limit though. I think I got everything on Black Friday, and then I updated from a GTX 770 to the 970 on Christmas because I wasn't getting the performance I wanted. 980Ti back then was aimed at 1440p. Nothing could play 4k properly at the time.

[Needfuldoer]

10 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

The 4790k is such a legendary chip, an absolute unit. I used one in my workstation for years and it was a champ, a needed sizable ram upgrade and wanting to move to an NVMe-native platform got me into an 11600k, but aside from those things I probably would have been on that 4790k until Win 10 support ended.

Haswell could natively boot off of NVMe SSDs, it's just that most motherboards didn't have M.2 slots yet. I shoved an NVMe SSD on a passive M.2 to PCIe x4 riser card into a Precision 5810 workstation with a Haswell CPU in it, and it booted right up.

 

But yeah, the Haswell i7 / 1080ti  combo aged like wine. I wonder how much of that was due to Intel spinning their wheels from Skylake through Comet Lake.

[Kisai]

On 4/14/2024 at 3:58 PM, GenricName123 said:

Hey veterans! I built my first 1-1 1/2 years ago and want to know, 6-10 years ago, what would be considered a high-end PC that could easily play in [insert highest gaming res here]. Thanks!

Pick a year, then literately go to Intel/AMD's website and look at was was released the year before. You can also go to Wikipedia

 

So

2015 i7-4770K (DDR3), GeForce GTX 980

2016 i7-6700K (DDR4), GeForce GTX 1080

 

Of course, depending on the exact date, and certain circumstances (like how 10-series and 30-series were scalped online, and 20-series were overpriced) some people may have held onto a system far longer than normal. It's not unusual for someone to buy highend parts near the end of the RAM/PCIe lifecycle and then hang on to it. Like I have a i7-4770 in the closet, doesn't work anymore, it got replaced with a 11700K. However certain circumstances has requirement to purchase a 14700K, because a 9th gen laptop is no longer suitable for the use case it's been used for. The 11th gen is going to take it's place because it still has AVX512.

 

Like ask most people who build their own rigs, they are not above buying a new CPU every year if that's what it takes for their use case, but most people who are simply playing games non-competitively already understand that you can stick with the CPU you have until the OS no longer supports it, and just upgrade the GPU until the MB tech changes. So if you want a PCIe5 GPU, you need a PCIe5 MB, otherwise you've slightly (5-30%) nerfed the GPU in certain tasks. But if you aren't upgrading the GPU (Eg a 20xx or 30xx) then you have no reason to upgrade the CPU before that.

 

When it comes to completive games, people would rather play the games on low quality settings to get performance advantages, or even use third party tools to disable some GPU processing. This is why in a competitive space where there are real world rewards, everyone needs to play on the exact same hardware configuration.

[maplepants]

Ok, so you've gotten some correct answers here and now you might be wondering "but how could 2014 me somehow buy a lot of GPU power *without* getting a machine that can really game?".

 

For that, Apple's got you covered with the trash can Mac Pro. You could equip with an 8 core Xeon E5 and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs. Users from 2015 reported 70-90 FPS in Battlefield 4.

 

If you bought that thing just to game, you'd probably not be too pumped. But if you needed a Mac Pro anyway, and added the GPUs so that it could be your gaming PC as well, you'd've liked it.

[jimm_eh]

On 4/16/2024 at 3:02 AM, Needfuldoer said:

But yeah, the Haswell i7 / 1080ti  combo aged like wine. I wonder how much of that was due to Intel spinning their wheels from Skylake through Comet Lake.

Most of it, I'd say (at least as far as the CPU side goes).  Intel sort of leveled off after Sandy Bridge and coasted until Zen finally forced its hand.

I just retired a 2012-built 3770k setup (with OC to 4.2GHz) in January, that was "enough" for a VERY long time (with GPU upgrades from a 460 to 660, 760 (4GB), 970 and finally 1080). Being originally built as a workstation, it had 32GB from the start.  It only started to seem a bit long in the tooth by 8th gen when Zen's arrival finally freed consumer chips from Intel's 4c8t holding pen, and even then, my games didn't start noticing or wanting more CPU/cores for a while after that (in part because I wasn't playing big AAA titles).