GTX 670 and i7 3820 in 2024 – E-Waste or Still Good For Gaming?
A friend stumbled upon this ageing relic, a Cyberpower PC from circa 2012, that was actually pretty decent for its day. This is rocking one of the earliest HEDT chipsets – HEDT meaning High-End Desktop, as in the extra-core’d, extra-IO’d CPUs on an extra expensive motherboard – with this being an X79 board, and i7 3820 CPU. The graphics card though, that’s where it’s at – a GTX 670. This was, depending on how you looked at it, the second or sort of technically third most powerful GPU NVIDIA made at the time, with that confusion stemming from the GTX 690, which was actually just two GTX 680s SLI’d together on one PCB, but still. The 670 was an impressive card – but together with this i7, how does this fare in 2024? Is it e-waste, or is it still good enough for gaming? Let’s find out!
The system itself is, at least as far as I know, unchanged from it’s as-new condition, save for a 512GB SATA SSD I installed as the hard drive was removed when my friend got his hands on it. So, what’s actually in here? Well, a Gigabyte X79 UD3 motherboard – that means you have quad channel RAM (albeit only one dimm per channel) of DDR3 RAM. This chip tops out at 64GB of RAM by the way, although I suspect this board might be limited to 32GB thanks to only having four dimms. Either way, you’ve got an LGA 2011 socket in the middle, and a shocking four PCIe Gen 3 x12 slots that does indeed support quad SLI and quad Crossfire – for those of you younger than 25, SLI and Crossfire was a way to use multiple graphics cards to get more performance. It was mostly terrible, as it almost always had to be supported in games, of which very few games ever properly supported it, and there were issues like microstuttering, so yeah it wasn’t great, but this board supported the top end four-card version, if you had the money for it.
The CPU on the other hand isn’t exactly top end. It’s actually the lowest rung on the X79 ladder. This chip is still just a quad core. It’s a quad core with 40 PCIe Gen 2 lanes available. So why would you buy one of these over an i7 2700K – I mean both are Sandy Bridge architecture, both are quad core with hyperthreading, so why buy the considerably more expensive one? Well, if you needed all those PCIe lanes, the quad channel, double capacity supporting RAM, and 37 percent more power to throw at the problem. Now does this gaming PC make use of any of that? No, of course not, but that was the idea anyway. Anyway, that chip is cooled by what I think is a Corsair H60, which remarkably is still working just fine all these years later. As for RAM, we’ve got 16GB of DDR3-1600 – some real top-shelf stuff for its day really.
And of course we have the GTX 670. This is a reference card – back when “reference cards” were still a thing, and used an awful blower style cooler. This was real common, and I’m glad you basically can’t buy blower style cards anymore. What’s more surprising to me is that this is an NVIDIA branded card – not an NVIDIA GPU, but an card made by NVIDIA. Not Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA (rip) or Zotac in the NVIDIA reference style, an actual NVIDIA card. That’s interesting. What’s also interesting is all the empty memory locations – hypothetically this card could have double the VRAM, although you’d need a custom VBIOS to make that work, and let’s face it, the GPU core isn’t worth that effort.
Oh, and we can’t forget the case. This bad boy is the Cooler Master CM Storm, which despite it’s looks does, in fact, still have an optical drive and four more 5.25” drive bays. It also has like 6 3.5 inch drive bays inside too, although not exactly a huge amount of room for the big ass GPUs we have nowadays. So if that’s the system, how does it hold up in 2024? Well, let’s start with the CPU. I’ve included some points of comparison here, a 10th gen lower end i5 – the 10400F – a Ryzen 5600X, and the new top end Intel chip, the 13900K. Starting with Cinebench R20 single threaded, well you can see quite the difference. Even the 10400F – a now 3.5 generation old chip isn’t far off being twice as fast in the single threaded department, and the 13900K is three and a half times faster. That’s pretty impressive, albeit for a 12 year gap between them.
In multi-threaded we see the biggest difference, especially thanks to the core count improvements we’ve seen over the years. While Intel has rested on its laurels for a good decade or so – Sandy Bridge E included – we do now have higher core count chips on hand. The 10400F is a 6 core part, which is why it’s well over twice as fast as the 3820 in all core work. The 5600X is another thousand points ahead, and of course the ‘24 core’ 13900K is a bit over 11 times faster than our old i7. Interestingly, the efficiency cores in the 13900K are actually faster in both single and multi threaded than this old i7 – like just 4 of the E cores would still be faster than this 3820. That’s kinda crazy.
In blender.. Well it’s just bad. The BMW scene took just over a minute to render on the i9, almost 5 minutes on the 10400F, or 12 minutes and 38 seconds on the 3820. Ouch. What’s worse is the Gooseberry render which took just under 6 minutes on the i9, but took an HOUR on the 3820. That’s how much of a real world performance difference there is. Of course that i7 only has a TDP of 130W, and in my testing only drew around 90 watts, compared to the chip-degrading 253 watts of the i9, but still.
Of course, you care about gaming results, so let’s look at those. Testing at 1080p, but on the lowest settings, you get anywhere from playable – like CS2 at over 100 FPS and Siege at 90 FPS – to pretty naff in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 43 FPS average, to just down-right bad in Cyberpunk at under 30 FPS. Maybe at 720p you’d have a better time on the more intensive games, but with no DirectX 12 support I had a few issues getting games like Cyberpunk to even run properly – the 670 is definitely showing its age. Of course in more esports titles like CS2 and Siege – and I’d throw Valorant, Dota and LoL in there too – you should still be able to play decently well, if not exactly competitively. For anything more intensive, you’re going to struggle.
But what if it’s that frankly terrible i7 that’s holding us back? Maybe the GTX 670 2GB has some untapped potential we just need to pair with the right CPU to release!? Well, I stuck that 670 in my i5 14600K test rig to find out, and the results may shock you… In CS2 we see 50 percent more performance! That’s huge! We have unlocked a lot of potential here – let’s see if that carries on to the other titles! In Siege… we get… oh. Less performance. I mean not by much, but a little less. Maybe Shadow of the Tomb Raider will save us… oh no, that’s basically the same too. Cyberpunk? Narp. That’s the same too. Damn, I guess the GTX 670 2GB doesn’t have that much potential left to tap…
So, is this system e-waste or is it still good enough for gaming? Well, depending on the game, it’s either still fine, or past its use-by date. It’s still usable – especially with an SSD boot drive – but it’s safe to say you won’t be playing the latest, most demanding titles at anything other that 720p low, or esports titles at 1080p low. The CPU, remarkably, isn’t actually much of a bottleneck for the GPU, although I suspect anything higher end and you’d be risking it. Surprisingly, the system was perfectly usable. It wasn’t horrendously slow, it was noticeably slower than a more modern setup, but it was still perfectly fine, so if you do want to use this for more basic computing tasks, that’s perfectly fine. Equally, this should actually be a pretty decent – if pretty power hungry – home server. With the, I think, 10 SATA ports this board offers, plus all that PCIe connectivity, you can easily run a home server with a bunch of networking on this. The only real catch is the RAM capacity and the maximum of 6 cores on this platform, which if you want to run virtual machines and stuff isn’t ideal, but the option is certainly there – and this case is great for storage too. So, I don’t think this is ready for the scrap pile yet, but it’s certainly past its prime for gaming.
