I Will Never Upgrade My PC/Buy Another PC/Benchmarking Project

2026-08-14

• Reason one: Modern PC hardware is just really expensive. I don’t want to spend money if I can avoid it
• Reason two: Modern PC hardware is very power hungry/hot. I don’t like my room being hot, even though I live in Scotland it still gets really hot in summer, so a gaming PC that outputs 400W of heat into the room doesn’t really work
• Reason three: I try to avoid playing modern games anyway, as there are so many older games I haven’t played yet (Fallout 4, Witcher 3, GTA IV, God of War, Spider-Man etc, not to mention indies and retro games)
• Reason four: Buying things is a nightmare. There is always a problem with something, something that doesn’t work

Current PC Specs

CPU: Ryzen 5 5600X (backup 5600)
GPU: NVidia RTX 2070 (backup GTX 1660 Super)
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Motherboard: ASUS B550M TUF-Gaming Plus super edition or something like that
PSU: EVGA 750W fully modular
Case: My lovely Fractal Design case
Storage: One of many SATA or NVME SSDs I have lying around

When I first build a PC I had the same RTX 2070 with an Intel i5-8600K. After a few upgrades/tweaks over the years I now have the build above. I have a backup CPU and a backup GPU that are roughly equivalent/slightly worse than the active ones.

For my monitor, I have a cheap 1080p 21 inch BenQ monitor, and a nicer 1080p ultrawide 29 inch monitor.

Basically any game before 2020 will work perfectly fine at 1080p/1080p ultrawide. After 2020 it’s hit or miss

Benchmarking Projects

I plan to benchmark games as I play them and add it to a big list on my main website. I’m a big advocate that old PCs are still perfectly fine, even for gaming, so I’d like to see how well more modern games play on my PC.