Old workstation to E-Sports machine?

Subcomandante Marcos

Hey all,

Been asked if I could throw together a cheap build for a friend's kid as he's been saving for one and they're going to help him buy it as a surprise.

He only really plays Fortnite (on console at the min) and wants a machine that can run stuff like that, overwatch, CS:GO, Roblox, and that sort of thing.

I was thinking of getting an old workstation with say a 3rd gen i5/i7 and 16gb ram and throwing in an SSD and a GT 1030 or RX 550.

All pretty straight forward and will cover the games he's into.

But thinking about it, if I could get a slightly older GPU and upgrade the PSU to 450w or so, it might be a bit more future proof and might even run AAA titles at 1080 mid-low settings, which would be nice for him too.


What older cards are going cheap 2nd hand these days that would run say Black Ops 4, Battlefield V etc?

And if anyone knows of any decent looking "gamer-y" mid tower ATX cases that might be a good fit that would be cool too.

Want to keep the build as as cheap as possible.

Subcomandante Marcos

sugarman wrote: »

An old workstation is a good idea, something with an i5 3570 or even better an i7 3770 would be ideal, easy to come across and very affordable.

But 16GB RAM is absolute overkill, 8GB is more than enough.. money would be better spent towards the graphics card.

As for the GTX 1030 and RX 550, theyre really bottem of the barrel stuff, for not much more you could pick up an RX 570 or even 580 which would be significantly better.

What kind of budget are you looking at here?

Wanna keep it under €250*, and the closer to 200 the better tbh, 8gb being plenty would indeed be a significant saver, as I've seen plenty of 3470's and 3570's builds with 8gb for in and around 100-120.

Do you think I could get a 580 or 1060 for around 125ish these days?
That would leave 25 to throw in a 120gb boot drive for him and he could use the 500gb hdd from the workstation for storage if I get a workstation for +/- 100.



*this is just for the machine, they have a 1080p monitor from another machine they're going to give him and they'll get the mouse and keyboard with him so he can pick ones he likes.

TerrorFirmer

An i7-2600 or i7-3770 are the best all-round CPUs on that limited budget. Pretty much all i5's choke badly on the likes of new Battlefield's online apart from the very latest six-core versions and maybe the Skylake i5's.

Find a workstation with either i7 for about €130 on Ebay and spend the rest on a 2nd hand GTX1050ti for €120 (no six pin required) or a RX470 for €130 (faster but needs a six pin) or whatever you can afford. You would be good to play the likes of even Battlefield V online at 1080p medium settings at 60fps.

Make sure the ram is in dual channel config also, should always be the case with workstations anyway but single channel ram really hurts performance (especially when these older PC's likely will have 1333mhz ram).

With a budget of €250 corners have to be cut somewhere, I'd forget about any PSU upgrades, SSDs or fancy cases and just get the best core machine you can for the money.

K.O.Kiki

OMG TerrorFirmer would you stop evaluating everything by Battlefield! :pac:

@OP
Forget the GT1030, it's junk.

Your search should be GTX 1050 Ti or 1050 3Gb if buying the GPU new.
Sadly, AMD cards in this range require extra power and are therefore out of the running (also, there's too many gimped AMD models making search a hassle)

An i5 machine is fine, generally you can score something with i5-3470 for under €130.

TerrorFirmer

He literally mentioned BF:V in the OP as a game he'd like to play on it! So an i7-2600 or i7-3770 is pretty much essential, it's horrible to play on older i5's, unless you capped it at 30fps it's pretty much unplayable.

I think most new big games are starting to struggle on older i5s, like latest Assassins Creed, etc. The i7-2600 still flies the flag pretty well though thanks to the extra threads.

I also wouldn't write off the GT1030 as junk, you can get one for around €80 and it's pretty good in most of the games mentioned. I know it runs Fortnite and Overwatch at mid-high settings at 1080p 60fps pretty well. (the GDDR5 model) Pretty much the same as the old GTX750Ti.

Obviously it would kinda suck in BFV though, I'd say 1080p low settings even would be ambitious.

Lot of the workstations in that price range (100-150) also have a 6-pin PCIE connector, like the older HP Z400, Dell Precisions, etc.

Subcomandante Marcos

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Your search should be GTX 1050 Ti or 1050 3Gb if buying the GPU new.

It'll be a second hand card for sure.
I think I'm going to go with an 1050ti as it will run fine on the OEM PSU on the machine I've bid for.
Going with an i5 3570 and 8gb ram, a 3770 or similar would be great but they tend to be a lot more expensive (comparitively) than the 3rd gen i5's.
Might still throw in an SSD just because they're so cheap and will make boot times so much faster.

Without the SSD I reckon I'll easily get the two (machine and GPU) for less than the 250 budget.