Gadgetory

lots of gas so in the video that I posted earlier this week I gave you all a close-up look at the many different pcs I have strewn about my house one of which was my very first rig on the Intel Sandy Bridge platform that I built back in 2011 in the video I also mentioned an idea that I had to do a comparison video between my five year old desktop and a modern-day PC using equivalent Hardware relative to its generation I figured this would be an interesting test for those of you with similar aging gaming PC's who are still on the fence about whether or not it's time to upgrade while things like compatibility and new technology support should always factor in to your consideration when upgrading to a newer platform today's test will focus mainly around Raw gaming performance as this is usually among the top priorities for most gamers so starting off with a closer look at my old PC it's been rocking a core i7 2668 chipset with the GTX 670 directs you to from Asus this was a killer high-end machine when I first built it years ago but will soon find out whether it still has what it takes to meet today's gaming demands now truth be told I actually had some trouble getting this rig to work properly neither the GTX 670 or the integrated graphics on the 2600 K we're outputting a video signal when connected to the original z68 asus motherboard so in the interest of time I actually moved the CPU and video card into my wife's PC which is currently housing a slightly newer z77 board while this should have very little to no impact on gaming performance I felt it necessary to be transparent with you guys about the exact hardware I'll be using for today's tests apart from that though I'm even using a similar 240 millimeter a IO and my original 8 gig 1600 speed DDR 3 kit so despite the Evolve ITX making this look like a high-end machine this modified version of my wife's PC should still give us an accurate depiction of my old desktops performance now our current gen system is a slightly cut-down version of my sleeper PC that I built just a few months ago don't let its appearance fool you though the rig sports a core i7 6700 K the latest flagship unlocked quad core from Intel that has essentially filled the role of the 2600 K three generations later so this is actually a good match up for our testing will also be using ddr4 memory and double the capacity of my old PC thanks to the z170 chipset the cut-down part of this rig that I mentioned pertains to the graphics I swapped out the existing gtx 980ti for a gtx 970 the succeeding video card that arrived two generations after the GTX 670 one of the big advantages that newer gen cards have received over the last few years is a drastically increased frame buffer on flagship models so it'll be interesting to see how well the 2 gigs of memory on our GTX 670 hold up against some of our Triple A games now seeing as how both of these rigs are armed to the teeth with unlocked processors liquid coolers and discreet GPUs you can bet your Nash that I dialed in some hefty overclocks what's nice is that our CPUs and GPUs in both systems are great overclockers but despite my lead fingers it was important that I not push them to speeds or voltages unsafe for a long-term operation so for my old system I took the 2600 K 240 400 megahertz and pushed the GTX 670 to twelve hundred and sixty-seven megahertz the 6700 K was also dialed in to hit 4.4 gigahertz and our GTX 970 saw max clock speed of fifteen hundred and seven this definitely increases the overall horsepower of our pcs and utilizes their components to their full potential while staying within safe operating parameters making this a more realistic test than if we were to just crank the voltages up as high as Staveley possible now while our new PC is running Windows 10 I was having serious driver issues when trying to run the OS on my aging Hardware so I reverted my old rig back to Windows 8.1 to ensure the systems of most stability when testing fortunately the all-around solid gaming performance in Windows 8.1 gave Microsoft little reason to further optimize Windows 10 so this disparity in our operating systems should prove more or less negligible for our testing this will change soon of course with the ongoing development of DirectX 12 so perhaps I'll do another experiment later down the line once the Windows 10 API is made widely available finally before we take a look at our first benchmark I should note that all gaming tests were run at both 1920 by 1080 and 2560 by 1440 even though we're dealing with five year old Hardware here my decision to test at quad HD stems from the looming pixel craze that's infiltrated the display market in recent years with the early adoption of 4k 21 by 9 and the mainstream availability of quad HD panels and this rapidly shifting trend greatly affects how and when gamers choose to upgrade their systems nowadays users who may have been gaining comfortably at 1080 for the last few years are now starting to consider a jump to high res displays so for those of you who are in that same boat with an aging desktop I've thrown in those quad HD results to hopefully provide you some deeper insight as to whether your system is equipped to handle those extra pixels but enough jibber-jabber let's kick off our results with 3d mark firestrike extreme the heavy synthetic benchmark shows our 2016 system with a crushing 66 percent lead over our old desktop that's quite a far away we've come in the last half decade but certainly no surprise when you consider the several node shrinks and numerous architectural refinements over the years while this first glimpse of the generational gap is quite telling we'll need to dig up more than theoretical data to see what gaming is like on a five-year-old desktop taking a look at GTA 5 we used a blend of high and very high quality settings with no MSAA in order to keep our VRAM usage within the GTX 670 S 2 gig frame buffer still the overall quality of the game was surprisingly detailed and far from console territory and thanks to the sheer scalability of GTA 5 our old PC actually turns through quad HD fairly well albeit with a low minimum frame rate as you might expect the new PC smoked my old rig performing about 47% better at 1080 and a whopping 52 percent faster at 1440 this higher performance gain at quad HD is likely due to the GTX 970 having ample memory to handle the vram eating monster that is GTA 5 nonetheless I'd consider this game to be very playable on my aging Hardware even beyond 1080 the unforgiving Metro last light benchmark was run on Mac settings with normal tessellation and here's where we start to see our Sandy Bridge system showing signs of age while our 2016 rig makes this test look like a walk in the park dear old sandy barely scrapes by a 1080 and absolutely collapses at quad-hd demanding titles such as this one we'll definitely need to be dialed down quite a bit if sandi hopes to score any playable framerates also it's pretty amazing to see a nearly 80 percent performance increase in this game just to GPU generations later our poor desktop fared slightly better in hitman absolution on ultra with MSA a disabled topping 70 FPS on average at Full HD though barely staying afloat at 1440 no framerate dips below 30 thank goodness but the gameplay was starting to look a little choppy I think we're beginning to see a trend here that our 5-year old system just isn't cutting it these days when it comes to hypotenuses our final test in battlefield 4 on ultra might as well be my old pcs last nail in the coffin as both 1080 and 1440 resolutions suffer terribly with virtually unplayable frame rates across the board even our modern system gets weak in the knees here at quad HD dialing down the in game settings to medium or high would probably give you a smooth experience at 1080 with the old system but bear in mind that battlefield 4 is now three years old which means it won't be long before new triple-a titles with more resource demand overwhelm the capabilities of this old clunker and that brings us to our big question of the day folks is it time to upgrade your 5 6 7 8 or however many year old PC as the answers to these broad questions typically go it really just depends on you in my case today's testing showed that my old rig is in no shape whatsoever to handle resolutions beyond 1080 so if I've been itching to experience quad HD or 4k gaming this is definitely a factor for me to consider if I'm perfectly comfortable with gaming at 1080 and I don't need to worry about my frame rates are turning down my quality settings right wrong more often than not there's a chance that I'm not still playing the same PC games that I was back in 2011 I mean since then games have changed they've gotten bigger and prettier and more demanding than ever so realistically I have to accept that my once leading desktop is nowhere near as powerful and capable as it used to be whether or not it still performs well enough for my liking is probably the biggest question to answer when deciding to upgrade so hypothetically speaking if this was the only computer I owned right now would I upgrade it today absolutely because I'd want to see what gaming at quad HD is like on a freesync monitor or explore outer space with friends using a VR headset edit 4k video like a boss or simply treat myself to a smoother gaming experience not to mention computer hardware has never looked as badass as it does today whatever my reasons are for kissing my old system goodbye you'll probably have a different list entirely but I suppose that's all part of what makes PCs so wonderfully personal but let me know what you guys think of the results we saw today and don't forget to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it before you go you can check the description below for awesomesauce shirts much like this one you won't get this color but you can definitely get the design which is still pretty cool and also feel free to bookmark my Amazon affiliate link that's down there and use it when you buy stuff I stuff buy stuff as always I'm Kyle with awesomesauce Network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see y'all next video