Best investment for gaming, on an AM2+ mATX board with 4x4GB DDR2?

[VirtualLarry]

Friend's got an Athlon II X4 640 (3.0Ghz AM3 quad-core) in there now.

I own a couple of Phenom II X6 1045T 95W CPUs that aren't being used right now.

I've purchased a dual-fan Asus GTX1050 for him to use.

He wants to play Killer Instinct PC and Tekken 7 PC, competitively, among others.

 

[DaveSimmons]

What's the question if you already have the CPU and GPU selected?

For the "competitively" part: If the CPU is struggling, try lowering settings. In the old days of shooters players used to intentionally run at 640 x 480 to up their frame rate, and/or lower visual quality to get rid of any eye candy that didn't help with spotting targets.

For Tekken a fancy controller might help more than an SSD, but I'm a button-masher n00b so that's just a guess.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Wondering if I should pick up a Phenom II X4 970 or something on ebay.

Mobo is specced for 140W, but it is pretty old.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Larry, look at what I found in my toy box. A Tekken 6 wireless arcade controller. It's a HORI branded controller that I use for PC gaming that was originally for the XBOX 360. I also have a couple Street Fighter 4 Arcade controllers that are wired.

You said your friend plays video games competitively? Does he have the right gear for training purposes?

 

[tamz_msc]

The biggest issue right now with modern games on Athlon II and Pheom II is SSE4 support. Some games would just not run without it, or in the case of Resident Evil 7, crash after a certain point.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

Gamersnexus recently put up a new article to see how viable the Phenom II X6 still is.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2898-amd-phenom-ii-cpu-revisit-in-2017-x6-1090t-1055t

 

[NTMBK]

To be honest I wouldn't sink any more money into that platform. If he had an AM3+ board then at least he could upgrade to an 8370, but he's pretty much at the end of the line for AM2+. Even if you give him that Phenom II and massively overclock it, it's going to be limited by that DDR2 memory performance... and you're still not going to get close to the performance of a modern Pentium.

The 1050 is a nice GPU upgrade for now, but long term he's going to have to move to a new platform.

 

[Hi-Fi Man]

If you could sell the phenom II X6 to him cheaply it would be worth it. A Phenom II X6 still performs better than what's in the consoles. The only problem you'll run into is some games requiring SSSE3 and/or SSE4.1.

 

[PPB]

Are you from the united states? Sometimes I think you are from some ultra import protectionist 3rd world country from your way of thinking. In my country makes sense to reuse hardware old as dirt. But if you are from NA it doesnt make any sense really with the sick deals you get for hardware.

Sent from my XT1040 using Tapatalk

 

[Denithor]

Don't waste any money on that old machine. If you can drop in a "free" hex core it's probably okay, otherwise get something newer. I picked up a Dell yesterday with an i5 3450 and 8GB DDR3-1600 for like $100 shipped. Drop in an SSD and that 1050 (not a Ti? seriously?) and you've got a solid machine for most e-sports.

EDIT: And I've seen systems with Haswell quads going for like $150 or less there, if you look around a little.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Spoiler

They were never the best CPUs on the market, but they were fiercely competitive in price/performance, perhaps even after Sandy Bridge’s introduction. Sadly, they’re now obsolete.

Hmm. Well, I was thinking that might give him an edge compared to the Athlon II X4, that lacks L3 cache, and the extra two threads wouldn't hurt much at all, and might help, with games like WD_2.

I sold him a "gaming rig" with a G4560, 240GB SSD, 16GB DDR4, and a GTX950 2GB card, and Win10, but he's been paying for it for five months so far (low, low, monthly payments), and he hasn't hooked it up yet.

So I'm figuring, that he has some sort of hangup about changing machines, so I figured, maybe I should offer him an upgrade solution for his current machine, which, conveniently, has 16GB of RAM, so it should be semi-decent for gaming, assuming that we can bump the CPU up acceptably, and the GPU isn't too slow.

 

[waltchan]

Are you kidding me? Give him a new 2016 Sandy Bridge rig, there's one 2016 i5-2400 right now on eBay for $50, and I've decided not to buy it.

 

[Denithor]

Good grief. Just offer "migration" service to move his old files/pictures/etc onto the new gaming machine and be done with it.