Elden Ring 1080p High Performance Test

The performance of the Optiplex system was put to the test with Elden Ring, running at high and medium settings. The results showed that there wasn't much difference between the three settings, with the CPU being the limiting factor. However, the GPU was able to handle the game's demands, making it a viable option for 1080p gaming.

The system was tested on medium-high and maximum settings, and the performance was consistent across all three settings. The CPU performance was not maximized, but given that the newer architecture would provide better performance, this older system still managed to deliver smooth gameplay. This is in line with the expectations for Spider-Man remastered, where a similar PC game struggled with lower-end CPUs.

Moving on to Cyberpunk 2077, another popular game, it was tested at 1080p medium settings. To everyone's surprise, the game ran smoothly, with an average frame rate of 72 FPS. The GPU handled the demands of the game without any issues, making this system a viable option for playing Cyberpunk 2077.

Emulation Performance

The Optiplex system was also tested on various emulators to see how it would perform. Starting with Wii U Simu 4K Vulcan, the system ran Bayonetta 2 beautifully at 60 FPS, even with ultra-shadows enabled. The game looked amazing, and this was a great demonstration of the system's capabilities.

Next up was PS2 4K, where the Optiplex system proved itself to be capable of playing games from the original PlayStation console at 4K resolution. This was achieved using a development build with Vulcan rendering, which allowed for upscale to 4K.

Surprisingly, the Xbox 360 Emulator, or the "canary build," also performed well on this system. Tests were conducted on Forza 2, and while there were some minor dips in performance, the game ran smoothly, even at high speeds.

The final test was PS3 using rpcs3, where Tekken 6 was played to great effect. Other games like Ninja Gaiden and Demon Souls also performed well on this system. However, Skate 3 proved to be a tougher nut to crack, with performance issues due to the system's limitations.

Overall Performance and Recommendation

Given its price tag of around $130, the Optiplex system is an excellent option for those looking to build a gaming PC. While it may not be able to handle the highest-end games at maximum settings, it can still deliver smooth performance at 1080p, making it suitable for many gamers.

The system's limitations were mainly due to its older architecture and lower CPU performance compared to newer systems. However, with the price point being so reasonable, this makes it an excellent value proposition. Those who want to build a gaming PC without breaking the bank can consider this option, especially if they plan to use it for 1080p gaming.

While there may be some limitations to the system's performance, especially when running more demanding games on PS3, it is still a viable option. With the right power supply and RAM, this system can deliver excellent performance for many gamers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be putting together a relatively inexpensive gaming PC that actually handles PC gaming and high-end emulation really really well now with the release of ryzen 7000 Intel 13th gen and the really expensive RTX 4090 cards I figured we'd do something budget here to keep the cost as low as possible but still be able to do what those more expensive PCS do and that's gaming you know for me when it comes down to it if I enjoy a game I personally don't even mind playing at 720p but you know with something like this that we're going to be putting together today 1080 high and Ultra is totally possible with most modern AAA titles and when it comes to emulation we'll be able to upscale to 4K in something even like Wii U and this is all going to come in around 300 up to around 350 depending on the parts you use but before we get started here I do want to mention that this video is brought to you by urcd Keys I've actually been using this site for a couple years now out they do offer steam Keys origin you played they even offer Microsoft applications like office but the main reason that I use urcd Keys is for their Windows keys right now their Windows 10 Pro OEM key is 19.84 cents but if you use code ETA at checkout you can get 25 off and another great thing about buying from here is they do accept Paypal I just did this build here I need to activate Windows I'm going to head over to my updates and security we're going to go to activation as you can see I've got Windows 10 Pro but it's not activated so I'm going to change product key I'm going to paste it in here choose next choose activate and windows is now activated we're ready to go my warning is totally gone and basically that's it they'll email your code once your payment is processed and that's basically it if you're interested in picking up cheap Windows 10 keys for your new pc builds I'll leave a link in the description okay so yeah this actually turned out to be the most powerful Optiplex build that I've done so far this thing performs absolutely amazingly and these can be had for as low as 85 dollars over on eBay and for the configuration I have right here I paid 137 dollars shipped to the door this came with 16 gigabytes of pre-installed Ram a 500 gigabyte Western Digital blue mechanical drive and this is something I just store my games on and for the CPU we've got the i7 4790 now this has four cores eight threads and a Max clock up to four gigahertz and if you're interested in putting something like this together I would highly recommend picking up an i7 version over the I5 you can find the 4770 and the 4790 for around the same price and if we take a look at eBay right now just on the buy it now's you can see that these things are really cheap and if you go to bid on one you could probably win it for much cheaper you just got to be patient but I've actually had a lot of my regular viewers end up getting these for free from local colleges or really cheap on Craigslist so definitely keep an eye out so the way it sits right now we're not going to get much great gaming done but you know there are several different configurations we can go with it's got a 290 watt power supply and if you wanted to go with a GTX 1650 or a 1050 that doesn't require power then you could just plug it in and you're going to be good to go if you need power I would recommend getting one of these cheap SATA to six pin connectors I've had one of these running for two years in my son's room with a GTX 1650 never had a problem with it and it basically stays on 24 7. those two card options are great for a system like this and it can keep the price down depending on how much you can pick up one of those cards for but I wanted to get a little more performance out of this machine here and recently I know notice that there have been a ton of the GTX 1080 non-ti variants posted up on eBay for really cheap I was able to pick up this HP variant not the highest end 1080 card on the market and it does require an 8-pin power connector but I got this for 142 dollars shipped and I probably should have waited a little bit because I've actually seen the EVGA variants bidden out at around 128 dollars so yeah they are available I was originally going to go with the 1070 but I couldn't find a really good deal on one so I opted for the 1080 and it's really hard to beat the performance we're going to get out of this thing for the price now we will run into one other issue using a higher end card like this in an Optiplex and that's really the power supply this has that 290 watt power supply it's a proprietary Dell power supply and we definitely need to swap this out to run the 1080 in it but luckily they sell adapters and they're really cheap like six bucks on Amazon so I definitely have to swap this power supply out so I went with a cheap 500 watt power supply that I picked up refer refurbished on Amazon now these brand new are only 35 dollars but they had them listed for 28 refurbished and I wanted to keep it as cheap as possible I've never used this brand before but I did bench test it and to tell you the truth you're only going to need around a 350 watt power supply for the system we have here but we'll need that adapter and basically it's just 24 pins from the motherboard pin out on the power supply to a Dell 8-pin proprietary connector and uh these are like seven dollars it does work I've tested it and basically what we're going to do is just plug it right into that 24 pin on the power supply that end is going to go directly to the motherboard and we'll also need power to the CPU Port so it's a four pen connector we've got them right here so no problem at all and these power supplies will fit in these Dell cases quite well and just as a reminder I know a lot of these newer power supplies have it but make sure it has an eight pin PCI connector that way we can power up the GPU so going with these longer gpus in these Optiplex cases can present a little bit of an issue just basically clearance between that GPU and the hard drive bracket now you can actually take this hard drive bracket out it will require drilling a few rivets out and you can go ahead and remove this completely or you can just kind of flex it over a little bit I mean we're working with a really cheap older Optiplex and it still doesn't look bad here that's exactly what I did I just kind of bend it out of the way and this 1080 fits directly in here next thing we need to do is replace this power supply really simple to do we've got one four pin connector and this is our CPU power from that proprietary power supply so we're going to go ahead and unplug that one we've also got that eight pin proprietary Dell connector and four screws on the back of the power supply now with these Dells we've also got a little clip system here so make sure you push this blue tab down and there it is that's the power supply we're going to be replacing we'll just grab that new power supply make sure all of the wires are out of the way we'll just go ahead and kind of snake it in here make sure everything lines up and that little Dell clip system will also work with these power supplies it's just basic ATX PSU we're going to go ahead and secure it with the screws we took out of the original power supply we're going to have a lot more wires on this power supply than we'll need for the setup here but uh the first thing we'll need is that 24-pin motherboard connector we're also going to need power for a GPU and these should be marked so an eight pin PCI connector and we'll also need a 4 pin for the CPU power as you can see it is marked says CPU we've got a four pin right here now along with this uh you know we could leave the stock say to power from the Dell motherboard if you want to or you can just run SATA power directly from the new power supply if you want to and that's exactly what I'm going to do this will give power to our accessories like hard drives or CD DVD drive if you still use one but the most important thing about upgrading a power supply one of these optiplexes is the adapter so just plug it right into the eight pin connector other side is going to go to the 24 pin connector on the PSU so we've got power there to that new adapter we're also going to need a 4 pin CPU power connector and it's right by the CPU and you know if you've got one that has an eight pin that's non-detachable it'll still plug in I've just got one that uh you know comes right apart so we've got two four pins here and yeah I mean we could go ahead and boot this thing up right now but we still need to add the GPU we've got the GPU power connector here and I'm going to go ahead and tell you zip ties are going to be your best friend with something like this so with the wiring cleaned up with a few zip ties here and there looks something like this I've still got access to that eight pin for the GPU and a couple SATA power connectors and now it's time to add the GPU and like I mentioned since we're using that larger card we do have to flex this hard drive cage over here go ahead and angle it in and if you give that thing just a little Flex it'll slot right in here and there we have it so yeah I mean it's definitely a tight fit but I'm going to tell you right now once you see how this thing performs it is totally worth it we'll plug in our 8 Pin to the GPU and now we need to worry about storage this did come with a mechanical drive but I personally don't want to boot from a mechanical drive I'll probably use it for game storage so for the drive we're going to be running Windows from I just opted for a cheaper 256 gigabyte drive from Amazon it's a 2.5 inch solid state drive and we could basically mount it anywhere in this system but yeah I mean these things do come together really nicely super cheap and now it's time to test out the performance and by the way I've got that 2.5 inch SSD mounted right under the optical drive if you don't want to go about it this way you can always buy a cheap SSD bracket from Amazon and mount it right in the cage or right under the optical drive it's really up to you but the way I've got this set up right now is perfectly fine for my needs and now it's time to get into some testing in this video we're going to be testing out some AAA PC games we'll also run a few benchmarks and then by the end we're going to test out some high-end emulation and I was really impressed by the performance that this thing's putting out given the price I mean we're right there at about 318 dollars for everything that I have in this build here and sometimes you can get away cheaper you just got to keep an eye out on eBay and Amazon for good prices so as you can see we've got the i7 4790 four cores eight threads and we've got that Max clock up to four gigahertz on this CPU we've got 16 gigabytes of RAM here and I was actually under the impression that this was running at 1600 megahertz but it's 1333 I've already done a little bit of testing and you know if we were able to run ddr4 in this we could definitely get some better performance out of the whole system but this utilizes DDR3 and to upgrade this it's still pretty cheap picking up used kits on Ebay so yeah it's built we've got our operating system up and running Let's test out some games so first up we've got Forza Horizon 5 1080p this is a 144 Hertz display that I have here and we're at ultra settings no resolution scale or anything like that and the game is perfectly playable we actually averaged 78 FPS by the end of this run and if you did need more out of it I mean you can always drop it down to high it still looks great at high settings 1080p and I completely understand that this is an easier one to run you know it's very well optimized it does work really well on lower end systems but I've got a lot of stuff to test here so what I'm going to do is plug into my game capture so we can get a better look at everything I've got some benchmarks to show you then we'll move back over to some gaming and finally wrap it up with emulation and the first Benchmark on the list is geekbench 5. so remember the 4790 was released in 2017. single core 951 multi 3631 when you compare this to Zen 3 Zen 4 even new Raptor Lake chips this is nothing on the scale but for an older system like this it's putting down some decent performance moving over to some GPU benchmarks with 3D Mark Knight raid total score 24 105 and you can see that CPU is definitely holding us back fire strike 13 797 and finally time spy with the 6359 so on a benchmark scale it's definitely outperforming all of the little mini PCS we usually take a look at on the channel but you know these are synthetic benchmarks and now it's time to move over to some real world gaming and first up we've got Spider-Man remastered 1080p medium settings and I was really hoping that it would handle it at high and to tell you the truth you know this GPU would handle it but that CPU is definitely holding us back in this one at least at high settings I mean like it sits right now medium settings 1080p we got an average of 72 FPS out of it which isn't bad I mean it's more than playable like this but running it at high would have been nice Witcher 3 1080p Ultra No Hair Works going into this I didn't think we'd have an issue running it and we can get an average of 88 FPS out of this it's an older game still super fun to play one of my favorites and one thing that I just personally don't like myself is Hair Works that will take the FPS on down but it's still playable over 60 with Hair Works on with you God of War 1080p high and with all of these games there's no resolution scale going we can't use dlss on these older cards anyway and when it comes to Res scale it is built into this game but we're sitting at 100 percent and this feels good just like it is high settings 1080p with this game still looks absolutely amazing and given the price that we paid for this whole setup here this is some great performance here's Elden ring 1080p high and to tell you the truth I went through and tested medium high and maximum there wasn't much of a difference between all three of those settings and it's coming down to that CPU performance it's not maxing out the CPU but given that we have lower performance on each of these cores when you compare it to newer architecture that's what's kind of holding us back and I believe that's what was holding us back in Spider-Man remastered going up to high settings in the final PC game we're going to test here before we move over to emulation is cyberpunk 2077. 1080p medium settings we got an average of 72 F kind of wasn't expecting this kind of performance I know the GPU would definitely handle this game at medium but I thought that this was going to be one of those games that kind of fussed about the CPU being older architecture but as you can see I mean this game is playable at 1080p medium right so now it's time to move over to my favorite part emulation and this thing really does hang with the best of them Wii U simu 4K Vulcan back in Bayonetta 2 running great here at 60fps game looks amazing and I also have the Shadows from the game settings up to ultra on this game PS2 4K you're good to go with this now I'm using the development build with that Vulcan back in but if you just went with the regular old 1.6 build and turned on DirectX 11. this 1080 will allow you to upscale to 4K so basically as long as the game's compatible with the emulator you're going to have a great time with PS2 now one that really surprised me was Zinnia the Xbox 360 Emulator so this is the canary build it's uh very experimental but it's working great with this system and when it comes to a game like Forza 2 here I usually have to throw a more powerful CPU at it along with an Nvidia GPU but this little thing is Trucking through it and I did have a few dips here and there but those are shaders cash in I mean as soon as all of that's cached you could play this game all day long and the final one here is PS3 using rpcs3 here's Tekken 6 running great I also tested Ninja Gaiden and Demon Souls those are games that are going to work just fine but I did try to move over to Skate 3 and performance wasn't great when it comes to emulating some of these PS3 games with rpcs3 you just need more power out of each core and more cores unfortunately with this i7 4790 we've got four cores and eight threads it's not going to play the higher end PS3 games very well all right so overall really loving the performance that this thing's putting out especially given the price there and that 1080 is still a bit overkill for this i7 but I really can't deny the price right now on this card if you're able to pick one up at that price tag around 130 I would definitely do it you could use it in a cheap system like this right now later on down the road you could throw it in something with a more powerful CPU and really unlock what it can do and you know there's really no denying that this is a good deal for a PC if you can put something like this together for the price and yes you can just check eBay wait on it you will find prices you might even build something very similar for cheaper if you keep an eye out but if you put something like this together right now just keep in mind I mean we're basically at the limit of what this Optiplex can do there's not much of a better CPU we could throw in here to upgrade that I mean you can always add more RAM but really if you're not running out of ram running your operating system in games then there's really no point so you got to make a decision if you don't mind the performance you saw in this video then yeah it would definitely be worth building something like this or you could take that money and save up for a little longer and build a newer machine but for a lot of people out there 1080p gaming is fine even at medium settings and I think this would definitely work out for a lot of people so that's going to wrap it up for this one let me know what you thought about this build in the comments below and if you're interested in building something like this I will leave links in the description to eBay and Amazon for everything that I used here and you know if you've got any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching\n"