To please his son and allow him to play the big games of the moment, a father thought he had made a good deal by buying a gamer PC for 1,200 euros. That’s a very reasonable price, which generally buys a robust configuration capable of running current and future games without difficulty.
If that’s the price you can expect to pay for a gamer PC worthy of the name, with an RTX 4060 Ti graphics card and a recent processor like the i5 13400F, capable of handling ray-tracing and running AAA games in excellent conditions. Unfortunately, this is not the type of machine this father of a family chose to buy. This so-called made-to-measure computer is equipped with a GTX 1660 Ti from Nvidia and an Intel i5 2500 processor without K. In other words, it’s more than dated!
The Intel i5 2500 processor, first launched in 2011 and receiving its last security and maintenance update in 2019, runs on now obsolete DDR3 RAM and an old motherboard. The GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, despite being launched in 2019 and capable of running recent games with medium to high detail, is limited by an outdated processor that is likely to hold back its performance, both for gaming and general PC use. As a result, this configuration doesn’t live up to the asking price and will struggle to handle the most demanding games. It’s enough to disappoint both father and son…
The risks of investing in old equipment
This post on Reddit has not failed to provoke a reaction from Internet users, who are rightly calling it a scam. This unfortunate father of a family thought he’d bought a custom-built, powerful PC for gaming, but ended up with a machine whose configuration was way out of date and far from justifying the amount he’d spent.
Fortunately, this type of situation is rare, but it can sometimes be tempting to opt for an ‘older’ PC in order to cut costs as much as possible. However, this entails a major risk: you could end up with obsolete hardware that is unable to take advantage of recent functionalities. What’s more, upgrading this hardware at a later date could be more expensive than investing in a desktop PC with a more modern configuration from the outset.
To avoid any disappointment, it’s advisable to turn to specialist PC hardware sites such as Rue du Commerce or Cybertek and check how old the components used are. For €899, for example, you can get your hands on a relatively recent gaming tower equipped with an Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card, 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage and an Intel Core i5-12400F processor.
About the author
Rosalia Neve
