Upgrading 8 year old gaming PC for VR and next gen games

[Chiasek]

Hey guys, it's been a long time since I've posted on here but in 2011 (old account I had forgotten the password of) and in 2015, I posted here regarding my first and second PC builds and got loads of help. I dip in and out of PC gaming generally and for the games I've been interested in in recent times (CS:GO, Assetto Corsa, F1 20XX, Bioshock series, Borderlands series), my old PC has held up pretty well. A few things have caught my eye recently that have made me want to get a good upgrade though so I had a go at speccing myself some parts. There's not a strict budget (not the same as no budget) but I was originally thinking about £1000 and certainly closer to £1k than £1.5k.

I recently went to a VR experience place where we all had VR headsets, guns and literally ran around all in the same large room shooting zombies and it absolutely transformed my perception of VR in general. I am generally quite cynical about things like 3D and VR being very gimmicky so experiencing it being so immersive really piqued my interest. I started doing some research and had my heart set on playing Assetto Corsa in VR with my wheel and was going to buy a Meta Quest 2, then I decided to look up if the requirements on the PC were a lot higher and of course they are. So the most important requirement is being able to play AC, F1 and other driving sims in VR well.

Secondly, I also recently moved from a 1080p to a 1440p monitor. I've not run into issues in the games I've tried playing on it (AC and CS:GO) but I'm also fully aware there are a bunch of newer games that will have a much greater demand on resources and I'd like to start looking at some of the big titles I've not looked at in the last few years like Elden Ring and God of War. Also, I doubt these will be as demanding but I want to play CS2 and Valorant. I've also been watching videos where games like Skyrim, Fallout and GTA have all been given amazing visual mods that I'd love to be able to play with.

Here's the parts from my current build, it's copy and pasted from my Overclockers dispatch email from 8 years ago as nothing has changed since then, I fully expect that the only things worth salvaging are the power supply and case but thought it was worth posting anyway.

Gigabyte Z97X-SLI Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard
Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz (Devil's Canyon) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail
KFA2 GeForce GTX 970 OC Silent "Infin8 Black Edition" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Crucial BX100 250GB SSD SATA 6Gbps 7mm Solid State Drive (CT250BX100SSD1)
SuperFlower Golden Green HX 750W "80 Plus Gold" Semi-Modular Power Supply - Black
Corsair Carbide 200R Compact ATX Case - Black (CC-9011023-WW)
TeamGroup Vulcan RED 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLRED38G2400HC11CDC01)
Raijintek Themis Direct Contact CPU Cooler

I've been doing a bit of research on the PC components world in the past few days to understand what has changed and compatibility. I understand there is a fair bit of backlash around the GTX 4070 although given what I currently have and the current state of the market, it seems like it may be my best bet at around this price point? I believe with some of the higher powered AMD cards, I'd need a new power supply and have also heard good things about Nvidia's VR support and DLSS. I could probably make a saving by reusing my old drives but the speed and price of these m.2 ssds looks amazing and not worth me continuing to shuffle around what games I have on my 2 250GB SSDs. Only thing I've left out is a cooler, is it still strongly recommended to get an aftermarket cooler? I assume my existing one would need some kind of adaptor to work and I'm not sure if it's worth trying to track one down with how cheap it was.

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Gainward GeForce RTX 4070 Ghost 12GB GDDR6X PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GX-20Y-GW) = £549.95
• 1 x Nvidia Unleash Your Ultimate - Overwatch 2 Ultimate Battlepass (SKU: XX-047-NV) = £0.00
• 1 x AMD Ryzen Game Bundle - Star Wars: Jedi Survivor (SKU: XX-03C-AM) = £0.00
• 1 x WD Black SN770 2TB SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen4 Solid State Drive (WDS200T3X0E) (SKU: HD-58G-WD) = £136.99
• 1 x Asus TUF Gaming B650M-Plus WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Micro ATX Motherboard (SKU: MB-6K2-AS) = £225.95
• 1 x AMD Ryzen 5 7600X Six Core 5.30GHz (Socket AM5) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3DG-AM) = £248.99
• 1 x Kingston FURY Beast 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C40 6000MHz Dual Channel Kit (SKU: MY-29J-KS) = £119.98

Total: £1,289.86 (includes delivery: £8.00)​

​

How does that look? I'm keen to upgrade but not desperate to immediately depending on if there's anything worth waiting for as I'm still able to play the games I like. I saw an article suggesting the 4070 might already be getting a price cut but then another article saying they would halt manufacturing and I'm sure there's always a reason why you could decide it's worth waiting to upgrade.

 

[Tetras]

Intel alternative to get you closer to your 1K budget:

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Intel Core i5-12600K 3.70GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-69X-IN) = £248.99
• 1 x Gigabyte B660 DS3H AX - Intel B660 DDR4 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MB-5AN-GI) = £124.99
• 1 x Lexar Hades 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit (SKU: MY-018-LE) = £79.99
• 1 x WD Black SN770 2TB SSD M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E Gen4 Solid State Drive (WDS200T3X0E) (SKU: HD-58G-WD) = £136.99
• 1 x Gainward GeForce RTX 4070 Ghost 12GB GDDR6X PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GX-20Y-GW) = £549.95
• 1 x Nvidia Unleash Your Ultimate - Overwatch 2 Ultimate Battlepass (SKU: XX-047-NV) = £0.00

Total: £1,148.90 (includes delivery: £7.99)​

The board has USB Type-C on the rear, but only 3 jacks, what do you need for your VR kit?

You'd also need a cooler, but a half-decent tower cooler would be sufficient.

have also heard good things about Nvidia's VR support and DLSS

Yeah, my understanding is that nvidia's VR is better than AMD, but I don't know what it is like with RDNA 3. With the 7900 XT down to £750 might be worth checking that out before you buy a 12GB card, there's a VR forum on OCUK.

Only thing I've left out is a cooler, is it still strongly recommended to get an aftermarket cooler? I assume my existing one would need some kind of adaptor to work and I'm not sure if it's worth trying to track one down with how cheap it was.

You don't have a choice, because X CPUs have no cooler. If you 'downgrade' to the non-X then you get a cooler, but the 7600 non-X one is not great. The 7700 non-X gets the Prism and that's a better one which I'd be happier to use.

This is the go-to cooler at the moment, THG review and GN video review:

The Champ: $41 Thermalright Peerless Assassin CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

Sponsor: Thermaltake Ceres 500 TG on Amazon - https://geni.us/8An8nnThe Peerless Assassin 120 CPU tower cooler ranges from $35 to $55, depending on which mod...

www.youtube.com

How does that look? I'm keen to upgrade but not desperate to immediately depending on if there's anything worth waiting for as I'm still able to play the games I like. I saw an article suggesting the 4070 might already be getting a price cut but then another article saying they would halt manufacturing and I'm sure there's always a reason why you could decide it's worth waiting to upgrade.

You might want to consider the B650 Tomahawk which is £240 and has a pretty good spec, or the full-size B650-Plus (especially if you don't need wifi).

 

[Chiasek]

Intel alternative to get you closer to your 1K budget:

Hmm, interesting. I only pay attention to PC hardware during the periods I'm building and back 8 years ago, Intel was clearly the better choice but from the videos I'd been watching, AMD was pulling ahead and also AM5 being a new socket meant it was much more likely to be upgradeable in the future whereas I believe Intel is near the end of the socket's life.

That said, I always assumed I'd be upgrading my PC bit by bit and the reality is that I usually hold onto the PC as is until the whole thing needs upgrading so maybe this isn't as much of a factor as I always thought it would be. Looking at this, the AMD option is ahead in performance so with both those factors, I might be tempted to stick with AMD for the sake of £100 but definitely worth considering.

The board has USB Type-C on the rear, but only 3 jacks, what do you need for your VR kit?

This is something I probably need to look into more actually, I know it connects via usb-c and I assumed that was for audio too but it's worth being aware of. Unfortunately my case doesn't provide a usb-c port although maybe for something as fundamental as a VR headset, I'd be more comfortable coming out of the motherboard than through the case IO anyway.

Yeah, my understanding is that nvidia's VR is better than AMD, but I don't know what it is like with RDNA 3. With the 7900 XT down to £750 might be worth checking that out before you buy a 12GB card, there's a VR forum on OCUK.

Another good thing worth considering for sure as it looks like it has a minimum PSU rating of 750W so I could still use my current PSU. Saying that, I was already a bit taken aback by GPU prices having heard they'd recovered following the chip shortages and just come to terms with spending £550 so another £200 on top of that is really pushing how much I'm willing to spend on a GPU. I'll definitely look at some benchmarks across various games too though. I'll need to understand how VRAM is affecting gaming at various resolutions nowadays.

You don't have a choice, because X CPUs have no cooler. If you 'downgrade' to the non-X then you get a cooler, but the 7600 non-X one is not great. The 7700 non-X gets the Prism and that's a better one which I'd be happier to use.

This is the go-to cooler at the moment, THG review and GN video review:

The Champ: $41 Thermalright Peerless Assassin CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

Sponsor: Thermaltake Ceres 500 TG on Amazon - https://geni.us/8An8nnThe Peerless Assassin 120 CPU tower cooler ranges from $35 to $55, depending on which mod...

www.youtube.com

You might want to consider the B650 Tomahawk which is £240 and has a pretty good spec, or the full-size B650-Plus (especially if you don't need wifi).

Fantastic info here, I guess I will go for that cooler regardless. I read the height is 155mm which should fit in the case fine as my current cooler was 157, hoping this height is the correct measurement to be using, I think the case allows for up to 165mm.

Also good tip on the motherboard, I feel like this was the hardest choice to get right as it's a bit of a boring component when looking at price/performance but actually very important when it comes to functionality/compatibilty etc. Wi-Fi would be preferred as I do tend to use a wired connection when gaming but have had enough situations where I set up the PC somewhere without a cable and just want to be able to get online so that B650 option looks good if I do go AMD.

Thanks so much for all the info, it's given me some more focus to my research. I think my main focus right now is trying to work out how big of a barrier 12GB of VRAM is for the future. For some reason I lean more towards Nvidia because I've had 2 Nvidia cards before and always got the impression that they had the best optimisation and support with games but I wouldn't be surprised to learn my info is both dated/unfounded or both. They do also seem to be poor value with the latest gen.

 

[Tetras]

AM5 being a new socket meant it was much more likely to be upgradeable in the future whereas I believe Intel is near the end of the socket's life.

This is true, yep.

Looking at this, the AMD option is ahead in performance so with both those factors, I might be tempted to stick with AMD for the sake of £100 but definitely worth considering.

12600K is what you might consider dated now, because the 13600K is out, but realistically I don't think you'd notice the difference with a 4070 (the benchmarks that show meaningful differences between these CPUs are usually at lower resolutions with a 4090).

The exception to AMD being comparable or faster is in app performance, where similarly priced CPUs like the i5-13500 are faster in multi-threaded productivity use than the 7600/7600X (not single-thread), but a little slower than the 12600K or 7600/7600X in games. The i5-13500 can even beat the 7700X in heavily threaded apps, but I don't think that has any relevance here.

If I was trying to make a comparably performing build (rather than just cheaper), I'd switch the board to B760 and the CPU to a i7-13700F.

This is something I probably need to look into more actually, I know it connects via usb-c and I assumed that was for audio too but it's worth being aware of. Unfortunately my case doesn't provide a usb-c port although maybe for something as fundamental as a VR headset, I'd be more comfortable coming out of the motherboard than through the case IO anyway.

Yeah, I don't think audio is a separate connection, but I don't use VR so I can't say for sure. Usually 3 jacks is fine if you have 2.1 or 5.1, but a microphone or headset would need an additional jack, which sometimes you can address with the front panel audio header (for the case). I would personally prefer 5 or 6 jacks because it's just easier that way and you never have to worry about it, but if you only use a headset then it is overkill to have more than 3 (and they can be USB instead).

Another good thing worth considering for sure as it looks like it has a minimum PSU rating of 750W so I could still use my current PSU. Saying that, I was already a bit taken aback by GPU prices having heard they'd recovered following the chip shortages and just come to terms with spending £550 so another £200 on top of that is really pushing how much I'm willing to spend on a GPU. I'll definitely look at some benchmarks across various games too though. I'll need to understand how VRAM is affecting gaming at various resolutions nowadays.

I don't blame you, but if the money is a concern, you may want to consider that the Zotac models have a 5 year warranty (activated through registration, I think).

Fantastic info here, I guess I will go for that cooler regardless. I read the height is 155mm which should fit in the case fine as my current cooler was 157, hoping this height is the correct measurement to be using, I think the case allows for up to 165mm.

It looks pretty good, for sure. The only thing I would say is, if you pay too much for the cooler and 7600X, then you're getting near 7700 non-X money and while the included cooler does run a little hot, it is free and does the job.

With that efficiency I guess you can already imagine that temperatures are very easy to manage. While we were always fighting thermal throttling on the Ryzen 7 7700X, even with a Noctua cooler, we had no issues keeping the Ryzen 7 7700 cool. Even when fully loaded it ran at only 71°C, a 23°C improvement over the 7700X! AMD is including the Wraith Prism in the box, which is a very decent cooling solution. While it's not as powerful as the Noctua, it's a perfect match for the Ryzen 7 7700X, especially at the price of "free." We've got 86°C, which is still far away from the 95°C temperature that Zen 4 always wants to run at. This gives you plenty of headroom for bad case ventilation, or hot summer weather.

AMD Ryzen 7 7700 Review - Affordable Zen 4 Powerhouse

The Ryzen 7 7700 is AMD's most affordable eight-core Zen 4 processor. For $330 you even get a good cooler included that features RGB illumination. Performance data in our review confirms that the 7700 non-X offers pretty much the same performance as the 7700X.

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Chiasek]

Thanks for all the help, I ended up finding a second hand RX 6800 (non XT) for £380 with 2 years warranty left and from what I could see online, it was closer to the price/performance ratio I was hoping for when I first started looking at a new PC. It being a bit cheaper means that when a GPU generation comes out that is deemed a good price/performance step, I won't feel bad about making another upgrade then. For now, I think a 6800 will do me for 1440p gaming for a while and hopefully will be alright for VR with the knowledge that VR will probably benefit a lot from my next upgrade. While looking at benchmarks and performance demos of different games, I've doubled the list of games I want to try out anyway so should have lots to play with.

The components I got are:
My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Corsair Vengeance EXPO 32GB (2X16GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C36 6000MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black (CMK32GX5M2D6000Z36) (SKU: MY-4DF-CS) = £128.99
• 1 x AMD Ryzen 5 7600X Six Core 5.30GHz (Socket AM5) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3DG-AM) = £248.99
  
• 1 x MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MB-375-MS) = £239.98
• 1 x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive (SKU: HD-24P-SA) = £200.00

​

Plus:
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120
3x Thermalright 120mm PWM fans
2x Thermalright 140mm PWM fans
The secondhand Gigabyte AORUS Radeon RX 6800 Master 16GB

All the extra fans are probably not needed but I always just used the fans that came with the case and thought that with all the fan headers on the mobo and MSIs fan control software, it would be nice to experiment with how using more of the available fan slots affected temps and fan noise. My assumption being more fans means they don't have to spin as fast and therefore quieter? I've also just been reading about avoiding negative pressure (which is interesting considering the Corsair 200R seems to have a lot better airflow for exhausts than intakes. Anyway, so my plan is to have 2 120mm fans mounted on the front intake, 1 140mm on the bottom intake then a 120mm exhaust on the back and 1 140mm exhaust on the top. My original plan was actually to have both 140s on the top when I ordered them but now it seems that would definitely cause negative pressure so I've changed the plan slightly.

I've also read about the fact I'll likely need to flash the motherboard before it can use the CPU, that would've definitely stumped me, glad to know ahead of time. I've double-triple checked my power supply (SuperFlower Golden Green HX 750W "80 Plus Gold") will be enough and it seems okay.

So now I just want to ask, is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who hasn't built a PC for 8 years? I didn't know about M.2 drives back then but they seem easy to fit. I've not actually ever used Windows 11 but was thinking I'd go ahead with it for this build, any reason not to? Also, all the components I bought new should be here tomorrow, whereas I'm less sure on the GPU as it depends when it gets sent out, is there any reason not to build the PC without the GPU present? I won't bother temporarily installing my 970 as I can't be bothered to install graphics drivers for a couple of days use so onboard graphics will do while I set things up. I remember general advice previously was to do a fresh install if you upgrade a component but I didn't know if this actually made much difference, especially in the case of a GPU. For the CPU cooler, my current build has the fan pulling air from front to back, should I copy this with the new one too?

That's probably all my questions.

If it doesn't work, I'll probably be posting on here again

Thanks again all

 

[Tetras]

I've also read about the fact I'll likely need to flash the motherboard before it can use the CPU, that would've definitely stumped me, glad to know ahead of time. I've double-triple checked my power supply (SuperFlower Golden Green HX 750W "80 Plus Gold") will be enough and it seems okay.

Umm, you shouldn't need to with AM5 and a 7600X, at least not yet, since the CPU should work out of the box (AM4 is a different story, potentially), but there are two reasons for issues that I'm aware of which benefit from a flash: the thermal stuff (I'm sure you've heard about that) and the general stability and compatibility (with memory) of the system.

So now I just want to ask, is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who hasn't built a PC for 8 years?

I can't think of anything.

I've not actually ever used Windows 11 but was thinking I'd go ahead with it for this build, any reason not to?

Umm, not that I'm aware of, you might want to check out the Windows 11 experiences thread on this forum. I'm not going to upgrade until they support never combine taskbar on a default install.

is there any reason not to build the PC without the GPU present? I won't bother temporarily installing my 970 as I can't be bothered to install graphics drivers for a couple of days use so onboard graphics will do while I set things up. I remember general advice previously was to do a fresh install if you upgrade a component but I didn't know if this actually made much difference, especially in the case of a GPU.

It should be alright, if the installation is a new install then maybe hold off transferring your old files and apps over until you're ready for the graphics card. That way, if you need to wipe it afterwards due to driver issues, it won't cost you a lot of time. Make sure you route the power cables for the graphics card before you make everything perfect too

 

[Man-In-A-Teapot]

If you are "disposing" of most of the components of your old PC, you could still use the 250Gb drive solely as a backup drive.