Question Retirement after eight years?

[JEPTB]

So I believe it may be time for an upgrade, despite the old rig still doing well in most things. My first self-built gaming system, that I probably made a lot of mistakes on.

ASUS Sabertooth P67
I5-2500K
Cooler Master Hyper 212
2x 4gb GSKILL Ripjaw DDR3
Intel 730 480gb SSD, originally a 640gb Western Digital Black HD
ASUS Strix Geforce GTX970
Corsair HX650
Windows 7 64bit
Antec P183

I generally play Skyrim SE, Fallout 4, Starcraft II, Starbound, XCOM:EW, XCOM 2, and a few other games that are less demanding including Final Fantasy ports on Steam. Playing at 1080p right now and possibly thinking about moving up to 1440p possibly. Generally don't play any first person shooters unless you consider Bethesda games first person shooters. Received FFXV as a gift, but waiting for it to finish being released and not sure the computer will run it so I haven't tried it yet. No content creation, no streaming, no other heavy use on the computer. No use for RGB of any kind or care for pretty colors and prefer higher build quality, silence, and longer warranties instead. Generally wanting to stay at stock and value silence/reliability with good performance rather than pushing overclocking to get max frames per second.

With Win7 EoL approaching, it seemed time for a new build. I was open to suggestions on what would be optimal as I've heard as little as a Ryzen 3600 with a GTX1660 to needing a Ryzen 3900X with a RTX2080Ti.

Was thinking along these lines, but was looking for suggestions:

ASUS TUF X570 - continuing the TUF line unless something more optimal
R5 3600 seems to be all I need, however R7 3700x seems to be a good balance, while everyone says a 3900x is needed.
BeQuiet Dark Rock 4 Pro - not really looking at liquid cooling and this seems to be a nice quiet air cooler. The stock cooler for Ryzen seems to be fine but whines a bit and this is supposed to be quiet.
2x 8gb Corsair Vengenance LPX or GSkill - Corsair seems to be lower profile
Intel 660p 2TB M.2 - Intel was said to be the most reliable ssd brand. Heard some bad stories of OCZ SSDs being extremely fast but dying quick. Helps that this is also one of the cheaper SSDs. OCZ is not really in the SSD market anymore, but not sure the price premium for Samsung is warranted.
Geforce RTX 2060 or a 2070(Super?) seem to fall between the minimum(1660Ti) and maximum(2080Ti) that I see suggested
EVGA/Seasonic/Corsair - Was thinking 650w-750w. I've had good experience with Seasonic/Corsair, but hearing a lot of good from EVGA
Windows 10 Pro
Fractual Define R6 looked pretty nice with a clean simple layout to keep the case clutter-free. Blackout option is hard to find in stock to help mute any RGB lights from showing if I can't find non-RGB components

Was trying to keep it under $1800 at the highest. Seem to think I don't play games as demanding as others especially since most of this runs decently even on this old machine. However when you start asking, people tend to lean towards $1200 video cards and $500 processors.

With PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 coming soon, I'm not sure if this new build would last 8 years like Sandy Bridge did.

 

[whm1974]

I'm quite sure that the Ryzen R5 3600 with a midrange dGUP would be fine. And who is everyone anyway?

 

[JEPTB]

Everyone = Reviewers of hardware on the internet in general, from youtube tech reviewers to tech websites, etc....

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that you could do a 3600(X), X570, RTX2070 Super, 32GB DDR4-3600 (RGB even), and a 2TB Intel 660p NVMe for not too much money. Yeah, and have some change left over for an EVGA Gold PSU and a FD case.

I'm going to say maybe in the $1200-1300 range?

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I’m thinking just bump the current systems memory up to 16GB and he’s likely good for 2-3 years.

 

[JEPTB]

Seeing that the old PCIe 2.0, non-nvme storage(sata III only), quad thread processor handled Fallout 4 coming out 4 years after it was built and running it on high settings without too much issue(it chugs a bit on ultra even with the 970 which originally was a 560 I think), upgrading to six core with a mid-range seemed like it would be fine. I know it is hard to predict the future, however since I build a computer every 7-8 years when most build them every 3, I'm hoping to try to foresee as much as I can. Without being able to predict the future though, its hard to say whether a new game I want will need eight cores or sixteen threads. Hence the dilemna between the 3600, 3700x, or 3900x.
I'm leaning towards the 3700x just in case things start demanding more cores in the next 7 years. I'm still not sold on needing a 3900x however strictly for gaming and casual computer usage(no photoshop, autocad, recording, streaming, rendering, etc.... just games that aren't first person shooters played at 1080/60 or 1440/60 and casual web surfing/computer usage). The i5-2500 was medium-high with only the 2600K being higher at the time, so I figured the 3700x is one off the 3900x being the highest this time.

Memory is not as difficult to upgrade, so it was a toss up between 16gb or 32gb however that can be added later if needed. Video cards are also an easy upgrade albeit quite a bit more expensive than ram.

550watt to 750watt seemed to be the range for a single gpu system and evga/seasonic/corsair seem to be the best brands per reviews. I'm still thinking 650 is about right. Slightly higher than I need, but seven years will wear it down more than three years.

The NVMe SSD was going to try to keep all of my storage on NVMe this time to reduce cable clutter and minimize loading times between cells.

I would probably wait for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, however that Windows 7 EoL is only 24 days away. Paying for Windows 10 on two systems seemed a bit wasteful.

 

[whm1974]

Everyone = Reviewers of hardware on the internet in general, from youtube tech reviewers to tech websites, etc....

Which Reviewers of Hardware on the Internet in general? I can easily find Reviewers who state that for most gamers the Ryzen R5-3600 w/ a decent midrange dGPU and 16GB of Memory will be just fine and will last a long time abet with video card upgrades every so often.

Example:
I built my system back in June 2013 and other then upgrading to a 970 dGPU, the Valve Steam Controller, and better keyboard, the computer is mostly unchanged. And I still play plenty of games.

 

[JEPTB]

Tech Deals, Hardware Unboxed, and a few other benchmarking channels pretty much stated that quad core was dead for gaming, six core would be in a few years, that eight core was needed moving forward. Granted these were benchmarking titles I would never be playing, but still felt the extra $100-120 for the eight core 3700x was worth it for future-proofing.

 

[whm1974]

Tech Deals, Hardware Unboxed, and a few other benchmarking channels pretty much stated that quad core was dead for gaming, six core would be in a few years, that eight core was needed moving forward. Granted these were benchmarking titles I would never be playing, but still felt the extra $100-120 for the eight core 3700x was worth it for future-proofing.

Considering that most gamers are still petty much using quad cores in their Rigs I will say that quad cores are very much alive. Of course that also depend on which games you are currently playing.

Steam user number of CPUs per computer 2025| Statista

When looking at the distribution of the number of physical CPUs run by users of the Steam gaming platform in June 2025, ***** percent of survey respondents indicated they had * CPUs per computer.

www.statista.com

51.31% indeed own quad-core processors.