Steam on old hardware

[Jsalpha2]

Got a 16 year old neighbor who needs a computer. He wants to play some Steam games, and the computers I can give him are very old. Would an AMD Phenom II x 4 830 be better than an Intel Q9550? What about a G3220?
Each system would have 8GB DDR3 and a low end NVidia video card. (GT 730 or similar). Right now he has a Vista era HP with 2GB RAM with on-board graphics. Most of the computers I build are for seniors who just do Facebook and E-mail. I have low to no budget. Mostly use parts from the forums, Craigslist, or dumpster diving.
Thanks in advance
Joe

 

[horrorshow]

*EDIT*

After some contemplation, I would give him the Q9550 due it having 4 cores and it being ever so slightly faster than the PII x4 830.

As for the video card, if you could scrounge up say, a GTX 650 Ti off Craigslist, he'd be all the better for it (over a GT 730). It's literally 3x faster etc.

There's one on CL in my area for $50.

 

[bjornb17]

I have a Q9550 still in an old system and it is reasonably decent, should be okay still with some lower spec games.

 

[horrorshow]

Yeah, I take that back.. What good is a quad-core when it's that old?

Give him the G3220. It has wayyyyy better single-core IPC.

Let me say again, GIVE HIM THE G3220!

 

[Jsalpha2]

Ok the G3220 is the newest (even though it is not a quad),and the best video card I can come up with is a GTX 750, (not the ti unfortunately) . It is in a mini-tower case, with decent air flow. I have a fresh install of Windows 7.
Am I forgetting anything?

 

[horrorshow]

So it's:

G3220
8GB DDR3
GTX 750 2GB
Windows 7

?

I assume you're including a 500GB-ish hard drive and hopefully a power supply that isn't complete garbage etc.

If so, any broke 16 year old kid should be quite satisfied with that setup.

 

[Comixbooks]

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G3220+@+3.00GHz

 

[Etherton]

Depends on the games? Surprisingly though, I have Steam (Pillars of Eternity, Stellaris, Hearts of Iron 4) and BattleNet (Diablo 3) running on my new Huwaei Matebook E. It only has an i5-7Y54, Intel 615, 8gb RAM and 256gb SSD.

 

[Deleted member 83233]

So it's:

G3220
8GB DDR3
GTX 750 2GB
Windows 7

?

I assume you're including a 500GB-ish hard drive and hopefully a power supply that isn't complete garbage etc.

If so, any broke 16 year old kid should be quite satisfied with that setup.

I agree completely. That will actually run a great deal of games at decent settings at 1080.

I play Borderlands (1 and 2) with my daughters, and they play on laptops. One is an i5, the other i7 but both are dual core (mid 2GHz), 8GB. One has Intel HD4000 and the other has a Quadro NVS 4200. I lower the resolution to 720, but they run at decent frame rates with a healthy amount of options up.

If these can run those games, the proposed system above will run a LOT more, and better. That GTX 750 would mop the floor with either (or both ) of the GPUs in these laptops. I'm actually planning to build similar (slightly more updated) systems for my daughters soon.

(KLake Pentium, 8GB, 1050 or thereabout.)

Neighbor kid should be quite happy.