[SOLVED] i7-2600 in 2020 for app development, occasional gaming

[ProgamerIV]

Hi!

The situation is the following:

I do have quite a modern rig at home, but we're building our new house, and it's now in the stage where I occasionally want to stay there for a few days to get a few things done (painting, gardening, building the garage, etc - stuff I can get done) - but it's a real pain in the ass since it's 150 kilometres from home, I want to stay there for maybe 2 weeks at a time and not travel 300kms every few days or so from home to our new home.

The problem with that is I work as a software developer from home, and I don't want to carry my main rig around all the time.
I do have a laptop, but that's not powerful enough even to run Visual Studio and not get on my nerves with how slow it gets, and I don't plan to buy a new one.

However, I did dig around in my hardware storage (I used to repair and build PCs back in the day), and found that I have an 1155 rig basically laying around in the storage room.

What I've found:

-ASRock P67 Pro3 motherboard (big ATX monster)
-Intel Core i7-2600 CPU
-2x8GB DDR3 RAM (some Kingston units, don't know much about them but they're identical)
-ASUS R9-280X 3GB video card (this is from one of my older gaming rigs, used to love it)
-Kingston A2000 500GB NVMe SSD that I bought for a rig and never used - I guess I could buy a PCIe adapter for that?
-An older Samsung SSD 830 with 91% condition
-Lots of HDDs in good/perfect condition, mostly 500GB ones, I could put 2-3 in the rig and that'd be more than enough)
-Sh*tload of fans in various sizes, even some with LEDs
-I also have an old, but perfectly working LG 1080p 23" monitor, and a 21" even older Samsung TFT unit that also seems to work. I could use those two for this rig.

So what I don't have (and have to buy):

-Power supply
-PC Case ( I have some old scratched Cooler Master ATX case, but don't really want to use it)
-NVMe adapter card if I want the A2000

That means I'd have to spend a little more on it, some 500W quality PSU and some cheaper case (maybe Zalman S2/S3?) could be alright.

I'm away from home for a few days, my main question before ordering anything and starting to build this rig:

-Do you guys think it would be enough for software development? Should be able to run programs like Visual Studio and Unity with bigger projects loaded, I also do some Photoshop.
-How capable would it be for some gaming? I remember back a few years ago, the 280X did fine in 1080p, but wondering how it is today, especially paired with an i7-2600.

Do you think it's worth building for this use case?
I'm mostly looking for people that have experience with hardware of this age, today.

Thanks!

 

[IproZ1]

If you don't mind leaving your computer on all the time, and you don't have issues with crashing you could look into connecting to your main rig remotely with your laptop using something like Remote Desktop that's built into Windows 10, or some other software. Might not be the best experience but it's better than moving it all the time. For Visual Studio that rig would be okay, depending on how big the projects actually are, and I haven't really used Unity to know too much about it. Personally I wouldn't try demanding games on hardware that old unless you're ready for making a lot of compromises regarding the video settings, and sometimes even the resolution. You could always get a bit better power supply, test the rig beforehand and return it.

 

[maxamillionfeettall]

The 280x is a thirsty card, 300w at load, so I can't really recommend a 500w psu unless its something like a rm550x or so. So a nice 650w unit would be what I'd aim for, gotta keep a keen eye on the market since psu's are in short supply and come in and out of stock rapidly.
The 280x will run games at 1080p 60hz fine enough at medium to high settings. Think 1050ti/1650 performance.

VS will use cores, the i7 should be fine, but you probably don't want to have other things running at the same time, lest things start slowing down.

The motherboard is just a standard atx board and will fit into any mid-full tower atx case. So just pick whatever case you fancy. The s2/s3 will work.

Overall, it'll work for what you intend, just pull your expectations on render times, etc. a bit back, 8 old threads will be markedly slower then 8+ modern threads.

 

[ProgamerIV]

Thanks a lot for the replies!

Yup, I did forget how power hungry the 280X is. Will look into a 600W power supply for it. I remember when I rocked this gpu, I had an FX-8350 paired to it with a 600W power supply, and it had the fan spinning like crazy all the time.

I thought about remote desktop, but I hate it. We have servers at work that I reach with RDP all the time, that's not something I like. This laptop I have is so damn slow even RDP would take most of its' resources I think. It's a Thinkpad T510 with a 1st gen i5

Of course I expect this rig to do way worse than my beast of a PC I have in my signature here, but that's OK, I can do with that, I grew up on slow ass computers.

1650 performance is really cool from a card that's like 8 years old or something. Maybe AMD fans were right about FineWine then, right?
I play GTA Online most often, sometimes Forza Horizon 4 with friends, I am used to just maxing things out as my current main rig can do that, but as I said, I am used to lesser performance from past experiences. Other than these, mostly less demanding games like CS:GO and Starcraft II, but I'm not a heavy gamer anymore at all.

Well, we'll see then!

I will put this thing together next week, might even post the results here just for those who are wondering what a setup like this can do. I'm a bit excited. Still remember the days when the i7-2600 was the absolute beast CPU everyone wanted.

The last thing: are PCIe NVMe adapters worth it?
Would I actually achieve the speeds you could get with a dedicated NVMe slot? I don't see any reason not to but I could be wrong.

 

[maxamillionfeettall]

The last thing: are PCIe NVMe adapters worth it?
Would I actually achieve the speeds you could get with a dedicated NVMe slot? I don't see any reason not to but I could be wrong.

Other then large file transfer, nvme will provide little benefit over sata drives. In VS it's a different story, and a good nvme drive can shave 10-15s off a solution load time, but there may be a limit for you since your board is older and probably only supports pci-e 2.0, the nvme drive would be capped at 2GB/s for 4x adapter and even less for a 2x adapter. Tbh, I don't see many 3-4GB/s nvme drives go past 1.8GB/s, so maybe an adapter and a inexpensive drive may work nicely.(if its a x4 adapter, a x2 adapter will likely only be <1GB/s.)

I don't have any experience with, or can vouch for any adapters 🙁