10 year old Gaming PC - Salvage or just straight upgrade?

Posted by SipperOfMilk@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hi all,

I bought a PC 10 years ago to mainly play LoL and CS:GO however I have never upgraded it and it has been used as mainly a work PC with some light gaming. I now want to start playing some proper games on it (Subnautica 2 etc) but was wondering if I should look to upgrade its parts or just get a new one?

The specs are:

CPU - Intel i3-8100 @ 3.60GHz

GPU - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

RAM - 8GB DDR4

I also have a 1TB SSD

[-]

crazyjerryyy@reddit

Honestly, given your setup, I'd say full rebuild is the way to go at this point. That 8th gen i3 and 1060 3GB are showing their age hard — Subnautica 2 and newer AAA will struggle big time. Your 12GB RAM and 1TB SSD are solid keepers though, so at least you're not starting from zero. For a proper gaming rig today you're looking at around £500-600 for a CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade, then another £250-350 for a decent GPU like a 7600 or 4060. Real talk, just depends on your budget — if you can stretch to \~£800-900 total you'll be set for years. Happy to help you piece together a parts list if you want!

[-]

Fixitwithducttape42@reddit

You can upgrade to 16gb memory, i7 8700, and a better GPU. All could be picked up on ebay. It's the route I would go over doing a full rebuild.

If you wanted more performance than that I would reuse the memory as memory prices have skyrocketed in the last year. And go AM4 or 14th gen intel (make sure you upgrade bios immediately to protect the CPU for 13/14th gen intels).

[-]

SuspiciousArt7316@reddit

Newegg has some decent deals on 9600x + mobo + RAM.

[-]

unused_solitude@reddit

for subnautica 2 you're gonna need at least a decent gpu upgrade, probably easier to just build new at this point eh

[-]

wolfy47@reddit

You need to upgrade basically everything. You can use the SSD and the case for the new computer but everything else is so old it with won't work with newer components or is something you really want to upgrade.

If you're on a super tight budget you could maybe get away with upgrading your CPU to a used i7 or i9 of the same generation, and upgrading your graphics card to something modern(~5060). You would probably want to get some more RAM as well. That might be enough for you to play at medium/low settings for a couple years. Big risk of going this route is that power supplies and motherboards tend to start failing after ~10 years and have a tenancy to take other components with them.

[-]