Low spec pc (and cheap) to play Steam shmups

[jandrogo]

I have and old i3 3xxx with a gt1030 gpu that has allowed me to play steam shmups and arcade indies for some years, unfortunately time goes by and with win10 it has become slow and clunky.

I need a replacement and I don’t want to spend more than 200-300€. I don’t need 2k, raytracing or more than 60fps in games, just something small, silent, reliable and light powered..

I am sure I would be given Steam Deck as recommendation, but I barely would play this as portable and prefer a one piece device, so I am considering getting one of those tiny Lenovo pc’s that can be upgraded with a rx6400 or rtx3050 slim gpu, or a refurbished small form factor dell. I even can use the gt1030 until I find a deal for the gpu.

I would also consider installing bazzite or Steam, if I get a AMD gpu.

Any advice or recommendation?

[NoAffinity]

I have and old i3 3xxx with a gt1030 gpu that has allowed me to play steam shmups and arcade indies for some years, unfortunately time goes by and with win10 it has become slow and clunky.

I need a replacement and I don’t want to spend more than 200-300€. I don’t need 2k, raytracing or more than 60fps in games, just something small, silent, reliable and light powered..

I am sure I would be given Steam Deck as recommendation, but I barely would play this as portable and prefer a one piece device, so I am considering getting one of those tiny Lenovo pc’s that can be upgraded with a rx6400 or rtx3050 slim gpu, or a refurbished small form factor dell. I even can use the gt1030 until I find a deal for the gpu.

I would also consider installing bazzite or Steam, if I get a AMD gpu.

Any advice or recommendation?

Can you list all your specs? To start, what kind of hard drive do you have?

If it's an HDD, an upgrade to an SSD will be a significant improvement. If your motherboard supports it natively, an M.2 NVME would be the best choice.

[kitty666cats]

A Dell Optiplex with however many GB of RAM you can get for cheap - and for GPU, well, that’s probably something you’d want to pick out heh.

Honestly my *old* Radeon (HD5450; the one people most often cite as a gold one for CRT Emudriver - though I just happened to have it already) can handle something like that if you’re just doing 1080p 60Hz with no background apps

[jandrogo]

Thanks for your replies @NoAffinity and @kitty666cats.

I finally bought a second hand Lenovo ideacentre 5 for 200€. It’s in pristine condition, but it has it’s flaws as a desktop enterprise computer: it’s not upgrade friendly and Lenovo blocked many parameters in bios.

Anyway, it’s an i5 12400 with 16gb ram ddr4, 500gb m2 hdd, and currently my old but reliable gt1030… Every shmup, metroidvania or indie game I’ve thrown is playable without issues.. I have not tried Teknoparrot or some heavy emulation like PS3 or Switch, but I am sure the GPU will struggle.

By the way, this is the topic that made me think about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments ... t3_110s9f5

[NoAffinity]

Thanks for your replies @NoAffinity and @kitty666cats.

I finally bought a second hand Lenovo ideacentre 5 for 200€. It’s in pristine condition, but it has it’s flaws as a desktop enterprise computer: it’s not upgrade friendly and Lenovo blocked many parameters in bios.

Anyway, it’s an i5 12400 with 16gb ram ddr4, 500gb m2 hdd, and currently my old but reliable gt1030… Every shmup, metroidvania or indie game I’ve thrown is playable without issues.. I have not tried Teknoparrot or some heavy emulation like PS3 or Switch, but I am sure the GPU will struggle.

By the way, this is the topic that made me think about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments ... t3_110s9f5

Wonderful! I've been on a bit of an older hardware trip myself lately. My first goal was playing fightcade on hardware I had on hand. An amd athlon 64, geforce6100 chipset ecs motherboard and windows 7 did okay. But of course I couldn't stop at "just okay". an upgrade to an athlon 64 x4 and motherboard with hyper transport 3.0 (and a gt740 picked up for $20 off fb marketplace) had fightcade running really well. But of course I then set my sites on some older 3d games like serious sam first and second encounter. And then I realized I had an i7 4790 with cooler still laying around. So of course a $30 gigabyte 1150 motherboard off ebay and 8gb of ddr3-12600 that I also had laying around, and man things are cooking now. Well, after picking up a rx580 for $30 off fb marketplace also. I swear these hardware hobbies will be the death of me some day. Anybody else tried out project R (san francisco rush decompile/port for pc)? It too is mildly demanding and im now running with all bells and whistles on and beautifully smooth frame rates.

Anyway, thanks for letting me share my recent hardware adventures as well. This older hardware remains quite capable for many enjoyable use cases, and can be had for quite inexpensively these days.

[Jack Emerson]

Beelink has a set of low-end mini pcs. I got this one for $160. It is my primary gaming pc. It has run every steam Shmup well except Castle Skihigama 2 (but the arcade emulation runs great). Tested all steam Cave games and many popular Shmups. I would buy again (but currently out of stock at Amazon).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0BYJ9BC ... asin_title

[AGermanArtist]

Can anyone recommend the best Beelink MiniPC for playing PS2/GC/Xbox Live Arcade - OutRun 2 Arcade and Afterburner Climax/Shmups - some Cave and the Otomedius games.
I'm not looking to run stuff like Gears of War, or anything on PS3. Although it would be nice to know it was capable.
I want to be able to run older games like Gradius V or Viewtiful Joe at full settings with shaders, at least 2X res and my Steam Shmups collection.

Been looking at this with 32GB RAM
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beeli ... 4723438834

Looking to spend around €350