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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I built a dev/gaming machine back in early 2010. It's stout, but not a ridiculously expensive (~$1,000) behemoth. The only thing I've done since then is toss some more RAM in so I could have two sets of triple channel DDR3 instead of one. I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings.

The only time I felt like I've needed an upgrade is while playing Planetside 2, which is/was very CPU bound for my setup. However, when it was initially released, Planetside 2 ran like a three-legged dog even on some higher end rigs. It's much better after a few rounds of optimizations by the developers, with more scheduled for the next month or two.

I dual boot Linux boot on the same machine for my day job, 5 days a week all year. For this purpose it has actually been getting faster with time as the environment I run matures and gets optimized.

As good as it is now, I remember struggling to keep up with a two year old machine in 2003.

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> I can still run just about any modern AAA game at the highest settings.

AAA games mostly target the console. Look at GTA5, which isn't even out on the PC. Most AAA games will run on a PS3, which came out in 2006, and has 512MB of RAM (combined system / graphics).

That said, there's a point of diminishing returns - making games look much more realistic will take obscene amounts of resources.

I expect there to be a system requirements explosion for PC games now that the new consoles are right around the corner and AAA game developers can finally target much higher specs.

An interesting opposite is the previously mentioned Planetside 2. It was initially released for PC only, and was a resource hog. Now they're working on bringing it to the PS4, so they're having to do an extremely aggressive round of optimizations to make it run decently. The optimizations will get a lot of testing on the PC version (think it's hitting the test server next week). PC players will benefit as a result of the console port.

Planetside 2 is a weird example, though. I don't think there will be many games that have a 1-year+ delay from landing on PC before they hit consoles.

GTA4 was actually a sore spot for PC gamers. The game was not optimized, so it ran like crap if you didn't have a higher-end set-up.

~$1,000 sounds quite cheap for a gaming machine which can still run any modern game at highest settings. I remember I built mine at about the same time (2010) for $2500, top notch video card, fastest cpu, lots of ram, but its 2013 now and I can not say that it runs any modern game at highest settings.

It was surprisingly easy. I'm not saying you over-paid, but for $2,500 I could have built something pretty ridiculous. Most of my money went into processor and GPU, which are typically your two big ticket items.

I trolled around Newegg looking for upper-middle tier components with a higher quantity of good reviews. A lot of the times you won't see a lot of the recently released stuff with useful reviews, so some of the parts were actually circa 2009'ish instead of being latest and greatest (2010).

I didn't splurge for a super expensive case, and my power supply wasn't modular (making it pretty cheap). i7 with a decent mobo. Went AMD for the GPU since (at the time) they were the best bang for buck. Got some cheaper G.SKILL 1600mhz DDR3 RAM (which has worked awesomely for me) for next to nothing, and I was ready to roll.

Post your specs to give your post some legitimacy… I hope you didn't skimp out on your motherboard…

2010 $1000 rig running all 2013 AAA titles at the highest settings sounds unlikely to me…

Not the parent poster, but I also bought a computer in 2010 for about $1000 and am very happy with it today. I still play games at max or near max settings with no problem. This does not include a monitor though; also I only bought a 1650x1050 monitor, so I save a bit on graphics power by not having the full HD pixel count (or more).

EDIT: don't know my full specs offhand; i5, gtx 460, either 4 or 8 gigs RAM (4 I think), a 120gb SSD and 2G HD

My i7-875K (overclocked, but not exhaustively; my Gigabyte motherboard has an auto-overclock function that raised the multiplier without killing stability) with 16GB of RAM, entirely too many SSDs for any one person, and a Radeon HD6870 is capable of playing every new game I've bought this year (Dishonored, Saints Row IV--I don't buy games from EA so the new title list is pretty short right now) at max settings at no worse than 35FPS--I personally can't detect a difference between 30FPS and 60FPS, so I don't care.

Neither Dishonered or Saints Row IV are particularly intensive games. I get in excess of 100FPS in both and my cards (GTX 670s SLI) barely hut 30-35% usage…

I don't doubt the OPs rig is powerful enough to play modern games, but I seriously question the "any modern game at highest settings" statement.

FWIW, I built a rig a great rig in 2010 which I still use from time to time. i7 920, 12GB DDR3, SSD, SLI GTX 460 2GB.

More like impossible. The Internet has many PC building communities and none of them could do it. Hell an i7 and good GPU at the time easily brought you over 600$, which means very little money for a motherboard than can keep up.

Well now you should just post some core specs so we can test your claim. Exact CPU, GPU, and RAM amount?

Looking at the Tom's Hardware system builder challenges from a year ago or two years ago, and the comparing them to the $500 and $1000 machines that they have now in their System Builder marathons should showcase the tradeoffs in performance vs price more starkly.

You overpaid. You're better off spending $800 and upgrading 3 times as often.

Particularly with GPUs. I wouldn't touch something like Nvidia's Titan unless I just had gobs of money lying around.

Well yeah, something like the Titan has no price / performance at all. Usually the best valuation is around $200, ie, an r7 270x or a 760. And if you want a premium card, 280x / 770 are both devouring modern titles. Anything past that is "I want the best there is right now, screw the cost".

Just picked up an r9 280x ERRRRRRRR... Asus CUII 7970 from Fry's for $279

Happily ran BF4 beta on High/Ultra 2x MSAA at 1080P.

That's not the point. He said he can run any modern game on high settings on the computer he bought 3 years ago, I doubt you can play any game in 2016 on high settings if you buy a computer for $800 today.

I can do the same, also with a $1000 computer bought in 2010.

Why does no-one ever factor in the costs of transferring systems in this upgrade process? It's not trivial to set up a new system and bring your stuff over.

In terms of gaming performance, when you go from mid range machine to high end machine, you are often spending 2-4 times as much without 2-4 times the performance. You hit diminishing returns big time.

I go with generally mid range components with my gaming machine. Even then, I upgrade every 3 generations for CPU and every other generation for video card. CPU performance doesn't impact gaming as much as it used to.

This gives me reasonable performance in most games around high to ultra on a 1920x1080 monitor.

Bingo. And there's now some pretty fierce competition between Nvidia and AMD again, so you can often catch some pretty good deals on a GPU or a combo if you pay attention.

I still use an AMD processor on my gaming/development rig, because upgrading to a better Intel CPU would have cost me nearly twice as much (I already had an AMD motherboard, so that helped). I don't notice a bottleneck in most games.

I think the best strategy is to get mid-range components and just upgrade more often. You get way more bang for your buck, and you can always sell the old components on eBay or whatever.

2010? If you got an i5-2500K and a 580, you'd probably get a PC that came in around $1200-$1300. If you could reuse components like cases, hard drives, PSUs etc. you could easily get that in under $1000. That should still run 90% of modern games maxed out at 1080p, with the exceptions being pretty much just Metro 2033 and Planetside 2.

If you're doing multi-monitor or >1080p resolutions, then you might need to get something better than the 580 however.

Im running a 2500k at 4.3ish with a CM 912+ in push/pull and happily devour pretty much anything. I don't foresee a CPU upgrade anytime soon. I had a pair of 6950 (the older 1 gigs) and just put in a 7970 and another 4GB of RAM for less than 400 bucks and only did that because BF4 is a resource monster. Everything else was fine.

IMO, you don't need the fastest CPU for gaming. I saved a ton of money by getting an AMD FX-8350 (I already had an AMD motherboard on hand, so that helped too), and although it does bottleneck in really CPU-intensive games, I can run almost all games on the highest settings at 2560x1440. The graphics card is really the only component that you need to splurge on for a gaming rig these days, because it's the bottleneck for the vast majority of games.

I bought a ~1000 setup in 2009 and it still runs most games acceptably (not necessarily highest settings). it was a Dell boxing day deal $500 computer + $350 video card (GTX 260) + changed the case and PSU.

Maybe the OP doesnt play some of the most demanding games?

> Maybe the OP doesnt play some of the most demanding games?

I play some pretty demanding games, but I was able to get a lot of performance per dollar building custom. I knew where it was OK to spend more/less and did a lot of research/shopping around.

Modern games are gated by GPU, not CPU. Except a rare one like Dwarf Fortress.

It's not even GPU today. RAM is pretty much the bottleneck for everything. CPUs have been so much faster than RAM for so long now that they have to keep doing more and more tricks just to keep utilization up at all. With gaming, it's always texture memory and transferring from RAM to the video card that's expensive.

I'm looking forward to the first CPUs or GPUs that are double-layer with memory integrated on the second layer...

Not true. ARMA or BF3/4 multiplayer on large maps can choke your CPU with ease.

I built mine in early 2007 for around $2000 (+-$300, can't remember exactly) and it's just now really starting to show its old age. It could use more RAM and an SSD (maybe), but for 99% of what I do, including gaming, it's plenty fast enough. I can't run the very absolute latest AAA games on highest, but if I turn the resolution down a hair or turn off antialiasing they run fine.

In fact the only thing I really want a faster machine for is some of the latest emulation techniques (Higan) and a vague desire to play around with some virtualization odds and ends.

I guess this will change for a little while as updated consoles come out and games can improve their graphics as a result, and also when 4k monitors start coming out. But yeah, until those two things come into play, older computers still play games just fine.

just for the hellavut i checked out gaming at 4k (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pq321q-4k-gaming,3620.ht...) and note that it takes Titan's in SLI (at $1000 each) to get good framerates on many modern games.

Like another poster said, with "game" terms replacing "data": " But, if you can run a [game] and it's [good framerate], it just means you should really be doing better [gaming] over more [pixels]."

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