Should you buy a USED GAMING PC? I5 4690K vs 11600K
Ok, I know. The GPU market is awful. Buying a new card right now is nion impossible, but gamers gotta game, so what do you do? Well, you could buy a used system like this one from one of my patrons, Chris. This would set you back around £500, and for that you get an i5 4690K, 16GB of RAM, a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, and an R9 390 8GB. In this market? That’s not bad, but is it actually worth it? How does it perform? Lets take a look.
For your £500, you get a quad core, quad thread CPU from 2014, which thanks to Intel’s lack of major changes is still very comparable to a generation or two old’s chips. Ironically, it’s also less power hungry, only peaking at 65W in my testing even under CPU load. That’s paired with 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3 – that’s likely to be one of the bigger factors in upgrading later as you’d be buying a system you would need to upgrade not only the CPU and motherboard, but also the RAM too.
Chris has used a 750W Corsair power supply though, meaning it’s got plenty of headroom should a new RTX or RX card fall into your lap. He even included the spare PCIe power connector so you’ve got it all available.
You get a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, which is a pretty common setup. The downside is the hard drive is painfully slow. Loading games takes forever, and some games even suffered performance losses when running from the hard drive rather than the SSD. Again, something worth upgrading later, which considering Crucial’s MX500 1TB SATA SSD is now between £60 and £80 on Amazon, affiliate link in the description by the way, that’s not too hard to sort.
Of course, then there is the GPU. It’s an R9 390 with 8GB of VRAM, which is a lot for how old that card is. It’s a year newer than the CPU, coming out in 2015. It’s based on the GCN 2.0 architecture, meaning it does support things like Freesync, and was the second fastest card AMD offered at the time, although it is basically a rebranded R9 290 with an overclock.
So that’s the PC, what does that mean for the performance? Well, comparing it to my recent 11600K and 3060Ti build guide, it obviously isn’t amazing. The 11600K is 66% faster in single threaded, and 200% faster in multi threaded in Cinebench R20. It’s impressive to see how far the performance has come in 7 years, and do bear in mind the 11600K, a Z590 motherboard, and 16GB of DDR4 costs more than this entire system.
With that said, if you plan on doing content creation, you might want to go with a more recent chip. In Blender and the BMW scene, the used PC took 619 seconds, or 10 minutes, whereas the 11600K took just 219 seconds or around 3 and a half minutes. It gets much, much worse in Gooseberry, where the 4690K took 55 minutes, versus around 18 minutes on the new i5. Ouch. I’ll throw up the Puget bench suite for Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop, but suffice to say the used PC doesn’t hold up all that well there.
But Andrew, this is a gaming pc, how does it perform in games? Well that’s where it gets interesting. Now for the sake of comparison I’ve run the games at 1080p ultra settings so you can see how it stacks up to a modern PC, but if you were running a PC like this I’d personally run low or medium for the best experience. Anyway, lets look at the numbers.
In Watchdogs Legion, even at ultra settings, it squeezes out 28 FPS average, and 20 FPS in the 1% lows. That’s not fantastic, but again that’s maxed out settings. You could definitely get a playable experience on this system. The 3060Ti does a pretty good job here by comparison, hitting over 150% more FPS on average.
In CSGO you get a very respectable 118 FPS average. Unfortunately, the experience didn’t feel great, something that’s displayed in the 1% lows being just 41 FPS. It was pretty choppy and stuttery, although again that was on max settings which I wouldn’t really recommend for this.
Cyberpunk.. Well yeah that’s going to be a bloodbath. It ran at just 26 FPS average, compared to 78 on the 11600K and 3060Ti. That’s 200% more performance. Again, at low settings you’ll have a playable, hell, enjoyable experience but I wouldn’t venture above medium.
In Fortnite it was actually pretty good at EPIC, running 64 FPS average, and 43 FPS in 1% lows. Sure, the new build runs 191 FPS average, which is still basically 200% more performance, but if you drop that to medium you’d easily be able to run 60 FPS minimums and closing on 144 FPS for a high refresh rate display.
Finally, Microsoft Flight. Yeah. You are reading that right. 13.5 FPS average. Yup. Even on low it’ll struggle, considering a 3060TI and 11600K only manage 43 FPS average I’d probably just not play this one on a PC like this.
So if you can’t buy a new GPU right now but you want to get into PC gaming, is buying a used PC worth it? I think it might be. It’ll depend on your budget, your current system (if any) and your goals. If you want a solid gaming experience and you’ve got a bit more cash to spend, buying a new gaming PC from the likes of OverclockersUK will net you a new GPU that’s actually in stock right now, albeit for about 200% more money.
If you are a bit more tight on cash, and especially if you don’t have a current PC, buying a used PC like this one is a great way to get started. Sure it’s not an 8K gaming monster, or even 1080p ultra, but it’s enough to play games with your friends and enjoy yourself. That’s the important bit.
If you were to buy – or build – a system like this, personally I’d spend a touch more and either get a new, faster HDD, or splash out on that 1TB SATA SSD so you won’t have horrendous loading times and lagging menus in game. Other than that, the system came well built, clearly well thermal pasted as the CPU peaked at just 59°c under full load, and well packaged too. If you want to pick up a system from Chris, ping him a message on our Discord, he is duragamer132#2722 or Number2FanChris.
