Discussion What is the most underpowered gaming PC you have ever seen?

[Order 66]

what is the most underpowered gaming pc you have ever seen? I (not by choice) tried to use an old school laptop with an intel Celeron N3350, HD 500 graphics and 4GB of DDR3 to play Fortnite which I had to install on a flash drive because the laptop only had 64GB of storage. Fortnite ran at 18 FPS at 800x600. Not only was the framerate unplayable but even if it had been, everything was just a blob a color so I wouldn't have been able to see any enemies anyway.

 

[Crazyy8]

FX 6000 something, GT 710, ~16 GB of RAM. Tried playing BeamNG.....

 

[Order 66]

FX 6000 something, GT 710, ~16 GB of RAM. Tried playing BeamNG.....

OMG, I can’t even imagine. I tried playing BeamNG on an RX 550 and i5 6500 and while it was playable at 1080p lowest settings it wasn’t great.

 

[lordmogul]

A buddy of mine played Fallout 3 on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a HD 6450.

And obviously most of the grocery store prebuilds. Things like an i7-8700 and a GT 730 on a H310 board with 8 GB DDR4-2133.
Or rather the equivalent at the time. a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with a Geforce 6200 and 1 GB DDR2-533.
Fast processor, decently sized RAM (but on the slow side) with an absolute piece of trash for graphics.

 

[Tac 25]

Q9500 with only 4GB ddr3 ram. Played Street Fighter V with it.

I still keep this pc around as a hobby. And for playing certain retro games, since it's the only pc in the house that can still boot with Windows 7.

0:00-0:19 to show that the pc only has a Q9500 and 4gb ram

Street Fighter is at 1:33

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2jMHaJggG4

 

[Order 66]

A buddy of mine played Fallout 3 on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a HD 6450.

And obviously most of the grocery store prebuilds. Things like an i7-8700 and a GT 730 on a H310 board with 8 GB DDR4-2133.
Or rather the equivalent at the time. a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with a Geforce 6200 and 1 GB DDR2-533.
Fast processor, decently sized RAM (but on the slow side) with an absolute piece of trash for graphics.

Alternatively, i9 9900k gt 710 and 8GB of Ram 3200mhz ddr4-3200 single channel.

 

[lordmogul]

Sh yes, have to go with single channel and the slowest officially supported speed.
And unlocked CPU on a non-oc board.

It's amazing how much it improves when running dual channel, even with the weak GPU.

But the GT 710 is a card that shouldn't be mentioned in the same room with "gaming", the 730 can be okay for super entry level 2014 gaming. At least the GDDR5 model. it will run Skyrim, it will run Rocket League (seen it hold stable 70+ fps in 720p)

Q9500 with only 4GB ddr3 ram. Played Street Fighter V with it.

That isn''t too bad, as long as the GPU is decent. For that kind of chip I could totally see a GTX 960 or R9 280 or something like that. Especially when you OC that beast.

I got a Xeon X5460 (3.16 GHz Core 2 Quad equivalent) running at 4.1 GHz and at that speed it can feed the GTX 660 Ti it's paired with just fine. Even a faster cards would run okay. (Doom 2016 runs GPU limited all the way down to lowest settings in 800x450)
It's still a 4 thread quad core, but a decent one and with juicy oc isn't too far behind chips like a Ryzen 1200 or i3-9100 and definitely playable if you manage your expectations.

 

[Tac 25]

I got a Xeon X5460 (3.16 GHz Core 2 Quad equivalent) running at 4.1 GHz and at that speed it can feed the GTX 660 Ti it's paired with just fine. Even a faster cards would run okay. (Doom 2016 runs GPU limited all the way down to lowest settings in 800x450)
It's still a 4 thread quad core, but a decent one and with juicy oc isn't too far behind chips like a Ryzen 1200 or i3-9100 and definitely playable if you manage your expectations.

if you watch the video at 0:00-0:19. The pc has an ASUS GTX 1650 GDDR6. Previously, it only has a GT 1030. Upgrading to a 1650 allowed a few more games to become playable. Sure, there is a bottleneck and minor lag sometimes, but the 1650 there is much better than a 1030. The 1030, is back in the box, on "reserve" status.

the pc also used to have a Core 2 Duo e8400, the Q9500 is an upgrade I did. My original upgrade plan was a Xeon as well, but I found a Q9500 first, it's cheap and never gave me any problems.

 

[Order 66]

I will not soon forget when my brothers tried to play Roblox on an i5-2400 and Intel HD 2000. I think it never got above 30 fps and it was about the same as my old school laptop that I have mentioned. My brothers actually thought that their i5 2400 PC was better than my previous i5 6500 and RX 550 PC, which I quickly disproved by showing them the FPS numbers.