This is pretty much my PC I game on daily. So yes. Fx-8350 with a 1070 is just fine for a whole lot of things.

That FX is still bare-minimum usable as a CPU, however I should warn that you’ll be using a lot of power at full send, as Bulldozer was never known for its power efficiency.

Just pair something like an RX 580/590 or RX 5500 XT, or your aforementioned GTX 970 to it if you want decent graphics on it, though.

And in terms of long-term support, the Polaris and RDNA1 card I mentioned is still actively supported with a modern driver stack via Mesa in Linux where your GTX 970 is officially cut off for driver support now as support ended with version 580, and open drivers were sabotaged for Nvidia on 900-series and newer due to locked-down VBIOS, so reclocking is a nogo, where 700-series and older fully supports open drivers as Kepler and Maxwell 1 were the last Nvidia GPUs to have an unlocked VBIOS.

Also, I would upgrade the PSU to something a little beefier that’s at least Gold-rated, but that’s just my opinion on that.

Though call. Like i dont want to shame your hardware or anything. But there is a reason those Bulldozer era CPUs almost bankrupted AMD. They’re just not that great. Those Zen 2 cores in your Steamdeck APU are so much faster that the multithreaded performance is still better even though it has half the cores of that FX-8350 .

I mean its a no brainer to just fire that old tower up with some distro and play around with it. That 970 is still plenty powerful for its age. But investing money in it? Idk. I wouldnt a lot. If at all.

Like if you struggle with the nvidia drivers i would maybe look into a cheap RX480 or RX580 with 8GB of VRAM. But anything above that is IMHO(!) wasted money with that CPU.

With an AMD FX CPU I probably wouldn’t bother. You can find much newer (used) CPU RAM Mobo combos being sold for dirt cheap that would perform lighters better.

The other day I saw an 8700k system without a GPU at a thrift store for $150. 8th Gen. actually supports many modern instruction sets unlike that old FX system. Put a GTX 970 in there and you’ve got a pretty decent computer.

One large consideration on this older hardware is electricity costs and efficiency. I mean they are definitely plenty useful for certain tasks but you might not want to pay to run a fleet of them 24/7 this becomes a larger concern for larger organizations. So it depends on what you want to do with it and your electricity access. If you are getting free/nearly free electricity or are paying for electric heat for your location anyway…

This sounds almost like the build I’m upgrading from now. I have an i5-4690 4 core 3.5ghz with 16GB DDR3, and an MSI GTX 970. I picked up a radeon 5600xt and it’s been able to handle a number of newer games with lower settings. That got me to pull the trigger on a full upgrade this week. But I was playing BG3 on medium settings and even Expedition 33. It’s not great but it runs fine.

Your CPU is better than that and I’d see if you can get more ram in there, you can probably find DDR3 for a decent price. I’d also check for used equipment. I got that gpu for ~$100 from someone who just upgraded to something newer.

I just upgraded a Linux box I build in 2018. It had a Ryzen 5 1600 and 16gb DDR4. Previously I’d replaced the video card with a Radeon 580. But with that config it sucked at video games, pretty much unplayable. Replaced the CPU with a Ryzen 9 5900 and slightly faster 32GB DDR4 and now all of a sudden it plays older games great. Probably the most challenging game I’ve tried is Doom from 2016 or whenever which isn’t much to brag about but the CPU upgrade made a huge difference. The video card and CPU was about $450. Definitely worth the money. It feels like a totally different computer.

As a side note, I’m generally not a big fan of generative AI but it was helpful in deciding the upgrades. In particular it pointed out that to upgrade the CPU I needed to update my motherboard BIOS. Double check everything for sure but it provided solid suggestions.

Yes but don’t expect it to run the latest and greatest games. My previous machine was similarly equipped.

Especially with memory costs high that’s not a bad setup. I wouldn’t bother with anything older though.

Warning, I’ve had an issue in the past where I couldn’t play a game (Deus Ex Mankind divided) because it needed a specific instruction set on the CPU (SSSE3). While not your specific case since the FX-8350 supports SSSE3 (I should know, that was the exact CPU I switched to to be able to play the game) there might be newer instructions sets that this old CPU does not support.

Also that GPU is older than what people like to remember, from a time where AMD was the worst GPU option on Linux. It’s very likely that the open source driver is good enough for that card by now, but there’s a good chance you might need to wrestle with the AMD proprietary GPU driver (fglrx) which is worse than the Nvidia one in some aspects and some distros don’t even package it anymore.

If you plug your Nvidia GPU that rig would be usable for gaming, I’m not sure what fps you would get as games keep getting updates and old hardware remains the same so old benchmarks might not be reliable, but I suppose it should run plenty of stuff.

It’s almost never worth it. 10 years have passed, everything uses magnitudes less power, and the bus on that thing wouldn’t even matter if you slapped something like an SSD into the PCIE (it won’t even have a slot for that).

Just recycle it unless you have a specific need for it.

Would make a nice server for self-hosting things locally (including potentially game servers) if you’re into any of that. That graphics card is definitely going to hold it back for anything else gaming-related, though.