Used PC, will it work ?

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 7:53 AM

Hello,

Came across a private individual that is offering his rig. I'm thinking of upgrading my system and thought this might work. Thoughts? Or should I consider newer technology?

Case - lian Li V3000 plus
Cpu - amd 5900x
Motherboard - amd cross hair hero 8 non wifi
Ram - 32gigs of corsair dominator
Psu - 1000w evga
Gpu - evga 3090 ftw 3 ultra
Storage - 1tb nvme + 1tb ssd

Ashnak · Saturday at 8:56 AM

Will it work for ED? Most probably yes, i.e. the HW specs are (more than) ok. Pitfalls may be the operating system (which you wrote nothing about), any damage and of course the combination of resolution, frame rate and graphics settings which you want to use. ED is now 10 years old, so any rig that was a good gaming rig back then or in the meantime will work.

Consider newer technology? It all depends on how much the seller wants for this rig, how it's set up, the state it's in and what else besides ED you want to do.

DeckerSolo · Saturday at 9:12 AM

Providing there are no faults, the pc spec is decent and will easily run ED.

AMD 5900x is AM4 generation, still available but no upgrade path to AM5.
AM5 is a completely different CPU Socket and RAM type. AM4 = DDR4 RAM, AM5 = DDR5 RAM
Apart from a 3090Ti the 3090 is a good as it gets with the 30 series Nvidia GPU's and has 24GB VRAM meaning you can max out the ED textures etc.

If you can best to soak test the GPU with FurMark and the CPU with Cinebench to see if any faults arrise before handing over any cash.
Any overheating may simply need CPU and/or GPU re-pasting, but could indicate more serious problems.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 11:05 AM

DeckerSolo said:
Providing there are no faults, the pc spec is decent and will easily run ED.

AMD 5900x is AM4 generation, still available but no upgrade path to AM5.
AM5 is a completely different CPU Socket and RAM type. AM4 = DDR4 RAM, AM5 = DDR5 RAM
Apart from a 3090Ti the 3090 is a good as it gets with the 30 series Nvidia GPU's and has 24GB VRAM meaning you can max out the ED textures etc.

If you can best to soak test the GPU with FurMark and the CPU with Cinebench to see if any faults arrise before handing over any cash.
Any overheating may simply need CPU and/or GPU re-pasting, but could indicate more serious problems.

Thank you for sharing. Grateful for your insights.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 11:07 AM

Ashnak said:
Will it work for ED? Most probably yes, i.e. the HW specs are (more than) ok. Pitfalls may be the operating system (which you wrote nothing about), any damage and of course the combination of resolution, frame rate and graphics settings which you want to use. ED is now 10 years old, so any rig that was a good gaming rig back then or in the meantime will work.

Consider newer technology? It all depends on how much the seller wants for this rig, how it's set up, the state it's in and what else besides ED you want to do.

Thank you!

Rubbernuke · Saturday at 11:09 AM

Considering I have a very old HP Z420 with a kindly donated GTX 1080 yes, its going to work.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 12:42 PM

Outstanding! Thank you sir.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 12:44 PM

wilbkr1 said:
Thank you for sharing. Grateful for your insights.

So I would need to change out the motherboard, cpu and ram if I wanted to upgrade in the future.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 12:52 PM

Ashnak said:
Will it work for ED? Most probably yes, i.e. the HW specs are (more than) ok. Pitfalls may be the operating system (which you wrote nothing about), any damage and of course the combination of resolution, frame rate and graphics settings which you want to use. ED is now 10 years old, so any rig that was a good gaming rig back then or in the meantime will work.

Consider newer technology? It all depends on how much the seller wants for this rig, how it's set up, the state it's in and what else besides ED you want to do.

It's custom built with all ek water components. Price includes the pc and the steel series mouse, keyboard, and headset.

Pc specs:
Case - lian Li V3000 plus
Cpu - amd 5900x
Motherboard - amd cross hair hero 8 non wifi
Ram - 32gigs of corsair dominator
Psu - 1000w evga
Gpu - evga 3090 ftw 3 ultra
Storage - 1tb nvme + 1tb ssd

All water cooling parts are ek brand, including cpu block, gpu block and active back plate. There is 2x480mm rads. All powered by a ek d5 pump. All tubing is soft black tubing and has always ran ek cyrofuel coolant. 13 fans as well as the coolant system.

I would assume it is windows 10 or 11 for the OS. My system is currently set for 4k, but not tracked the FPS yet. Cost would be 1200 - 1500. Thoughts of the current system config as was as scavenging current parts if I felt the need to upgrade. I belive I would need to change out the MB, Ram and CPU if needed.

Tifu · Saturday at 1:01 PM

wilbkr1 said:
I would assume it is windows 10 or 11 for the OS. My system is currently set for 4k, but not tracked the FPS yet.

Hope it's windows 11, Microsoft is dropping all support for Windows 10 come Oct 14 this year.

Silaz Carbryck · Saturday at 1:05 PM

I started up a thread the other year about my six core i7 6 y/o (now 7 years old) gaming PC being good enough still to run the majority of games out there. Most people seemed to think it was fine for playing ED, but not for some of the latest graphically intensive games though. It's only got a crappy low budget 6GB 1060 GPU and 16GB RAM, but is still considered minimum viable for playing ED. The only upgrade I was willing to pay for recently was a new SSD to replace the old HDD, as Windows 10 after a number of updates had ground to a halt taking many minutes to load up and ages to start up games.

If your GPU isn't knackered from over-clocking it looks like your build would be more than fine for playing ED and probably a lot of other games as well still, but a faster CPU may be necessary for larger settlements if you're playing on foot a lot as I'm told its the CPU not GPU that matters most in that instance with all the AI NPC movements going on.

Silaz Carbryck · Saturday at 1:10 PM

Tifu said:
Hope it's windows 11, Microsoft is dropping all support for Windows 10 come Oct 14 this year.

I'm not convinced MS dropping it's support for 10 is as big a problem as many think it will be. But my office machines are all Win11 SSD Dell Optiplexes, which is what I'm writing on now, to be future proof and to work with the latest Office 2021 software. I never saw the point in paying so much money for a new Win11 compatible BIOSless gaming rig when I don't play many games or very often these days. Pretty certain many people are gonna still stay with Win10 for as long as they can, or until it becomes impossible to use.

Markov Chaney · Saturday at 1:12 PM

Ashnak said:
ED is now 10 years old, so any rig that was a good gaming rig back then or in the meantime will work.

I've seen this comment several times recently - it's simply not true. ED 4.0 onwards simply doesn't perform well now on Skylake and a GTX9xx, not even spaceside. Planetfall? Forget it. 4770k? No chance.

There are substantial differences between 3.8 and 4.0. If there was a second tipping point it was probably Ascension.

Now anything five years old, yeah you're probably fine - but my Kaby Lake was CPU bound even with a lowly 1060.

Morbad · Saturday at 1:40 PM

wilbkr1 said:
So I would need to change out the motherboard, cpu and ram if I wanted to upgrade in the future.

The only major drop-in upgrade, for gaming, would be a 5800X3D.

wilbkr1 said:
I would assume it is windows 10 or 11 for the OS. My system is currently set for 4k, but not tracked the FPS yet. Cost would be 1200 - 1500. Thoughts of the current system config as was as scavenging current parts if I felt the need to upgrade. I belive I would need to change out the MB, Ram and CPU if needed.

What is your current system?

On it's own this system doesn't seem like that bad of a deal, but if you're already getting satisfactory performance spending this much on a dead-end platform and a two-generation old GPU may not be wise.

Ashnak · Saturday at 1:40 PM

Tifu said:
Hope it's windows 11, Microsoft is dropping all support for Windows 10 come Oct 14 this year.

There are very few Win10 installations that aren't upgradeable to Win11 for free.

That being said, I'm still torn between Win11 and Linux.

DeckerSolo · Saturday at 1:43 PM

wilbkr1 said:
So I would need to change out the motherboard, cpu and ram if I wanted to upgrade in the future.

Depends.

If you stay with the AM4 platform then no, but your CPU choices are limited.

You have two realistic alternate CPU options to the 5900x if you stay with AM4. The 5950x which gives you 4 more cores and 8 more threads but the same 64Mb L3 cache (the cpu I have in my spare system) and in my opinion not worth upgrading to from the 5900x which is a good CPU. Or the one I would go for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D which gives you less cores and threads but 96MB of L3 cache.

If you want to upgarde to AM5 or an Intel CPU then yes you will need to change the motherboard, CPU and RAM.

DeckerSolo · Saturday at 1:54 PM

wilbkr1 said:
It's custom built with all ek water components. Price includes the pc and the steel series mouse, keyboard, and headset.

Pc specs:
Case - lian Li V3000 plus
Cpu - amd 5900x
Motherboard - amd cross hair hero 8 non wifi
Ram - 32gigs of corsair dominator
Psu - 1000w evga
Gpu - evga 3090 ftw 3 ultra
Storage - 1tb nvme + 1tb ssd

All water cooling parts are ek brand, including cpu block, gpu block and active back plate. There is 2x480mm rads. All powered by a ek d5 pump. All tubing is soft black tubing and has always ran ek cyrofuel coolant. 13 fans as well as the coolant system.

I would assume it is windows 10 or 11 for the OS. My system is currently set for 4k, but not tracked the FPS yet. Cost would be 1200 - 1500. Thoughts of the current system config as was as scavenging current parts if I felt the need to upgrade. I belive I would need to change out the MB, Ram and CPU if needed.

Only thing I say about this is watercooling parts do corrode (have been there myself in the past and went back to air cooling) and could if they havent been maintained ie biocide in water etc have whole host of their own issues.
If the seller is providing the original GPU air cooler you could easily revert back to air cooling.

nemolomen · Saturday at 2:03 PM

wilbkr1 said:
Hello,

Came across a private individual that is offering his rig. I'm thinking of upgrading my system and thought this might work. Thoughts? Or should I consider newer technology?

Case - lian Li V3000 plus
Cpu - amd 5900x
Motherboard - amd cross hair hero 8 non wifi
Ram - 32gigs of corsair dominator
Psu - 1000w evga
Gpu - evga 3090 ftw 3 ultra
Storage - 1tb nvme + 1tb ssd

DeckerSolo said:
Providing there are no faults, the pc spec is decent and will easily run ED.

AMD 5900x is AM4 generation, still available but no upgrade path to AM5.
AM5 is a completely different CPU Socket and RAM type. AM4 = DDR4 RAM, AM5 = DDR5 RAM
Apart from a 3090Ti the 3090 is a good as it gets with the 30 series Nvidia GPU's and has 24GB VRAM meaning you can max out the ED textures etc.

If you can best to soak test the GPU with FurMark and the CPU with Cinebench to see if any faults arrise before handing over any cash.
Any overheating may simply need CPU and/or GPU re-pasting, but could indicate more serious problems.

@wilbkr1, I play EDO with an AM4 5600X 4.7GHz, 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, GTX 4060ti 16 GB (previously GTX 3060 16GB) on a G-Sync Compatible HP Omen 27" 165 Hz (locked at 120Hz in game, goes down to the 50s and 60s% on foot) monitor in 1440p.

In the rig you've described:

The CPU is a little better than mine (4%): https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600X/4087vs4084

The 3090 is almost 50% faster than my 4060ti: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-4060-Ti-vs-Nvidia-RTX-3090/4149vs4081

And, assuming that the RAM speed is faster than mine, probably much faster, you shouldn't have any issues at all running EDO on that rig.

For comparison, you can see the performance of my rig in the videos on my YouTube channel, linked in my sig below. I haven't put up many, or any, since I got the 4060ti at the beginning of the year, so everything there after Sep 2022 used the 3060.

The only reason I upgraded to the 4060ti was due to the really good deal I got on it (under $300 US) for the roughly 45% increase in overall speed.

All that said, and as @DeckerSolo said above. AM4 is getting very long in the tooth so it should be priced appropriately.

I bought my motherboard (ASUS TUF x570) in late 2020 (with a 7300X and 2060 then upgraded 1.5 years later to the 5600X and 3060) and it had been out for a few years by then. I've got one more upgrade (currently looking at a used 5800X3d [+10% speed] and 32GB of DDR4-4000 RAM [+25% speed]) before I'll need to upgrade to AM5 or maybe they'll be on AM6 by then...

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 4:24 PM

Silaz Carbryck said:
I started up a thread the other year about my six core i7 6 y/o (now 7 years old) gaming PC being good enough still to run the majority of games out there. Most people seemed to think it was fine for playing ED, but not for some of the latest graphically intensive games though. It's only got a crappy low budget 6GB 1060 GPU and 16GB RAM, but is still considered minimum viable for playing ED. The only upgrade I was willing to pay for recently was a new SSD to replace the old HDD, as Windows 10 after a number of updates had ground to a halt taking many minutes to load up and ages to start up games.

If your GPU isn't knackered from over-clocking it looks like your build would be more than fine for playing ED and probably a lot of other games as well still, but a faster CPU may be necessary for larger settlements if you're playing on foot a lot as I'm told its the CPU not GPU that matters most in that instance with all the AI NPC movements going on.

Hmm, now this is something to ponder on. Thank you.

wilbkr1 · Saturday at 4:37 PM

Morbad said:
The only major drop-in upgrade, for gaming, would be a 5800X3D.

What is your current system?

On it's own this system doesn't seem like that bad of a deal, but if you're already getting satisfactory performance spending this much on a dead-end platform and a two-generation old GPU may not be wise.

This may be sound advice. I'm not sure what my current system is exactly and traveling for the next 2 weeks.

I believe the Graphics card is the 2080ti or non ti. I also know it is an Intel processor with 16g of ram.

But maybe I should consider looking into scavenging of it and rebuild my current box. Hmmm.