Radeon R7 350x 4GB - i7 4770 8gb

[u/RLZT]

I have bought a cheap ass old PC with a i7 4770 8gb and win11 on a too good to be true sale and a used chinese R7 350x 4gb GPU intending to use them for emulation on a CRT TV rig, it results that the sale was actually too good to be true as the motherboard is unable to access the BIOS and overall shitty, and I still don't even know if the GPU is even working as it won't give any image (but the PSU has incredibles 250w and the BIOS gives me no image either, so I wouldn't give it as broken for now)

If I buy a functional MoBo, what could I run with that? I was mostly wanting to emulate PS3/Xbox 360 and playing some PS4 era games as the last console I had was a 360 and had no PC neither. But if I could run something released on the current decade that would be pretty cool too

I also ended up buying a projector on another sale lol, so I will use only that for a while, my end goal now is creating a dual screen Arch Linux rig with the projector, a 15hz CRT TV and a 2000s Phillips Home Theater with no optical input and only supports Dolby Pro Logic II or older, which I friend of mine wants to get rid of for very cheap as is sitting on a cellar occupying space for god knows how many years

I am also thinking of maybe buying one 8gb memory with the MoBo, as I'm a little short on money I can't afford 2 and 12gb RAM should be better than 8gb

God, I need to stop buying junk lol

[u/Gammarevived]

Emulating PS3 and Xbox 360 is just not possible on hardware that old. You might as well just by those consoles separately, as they're pretty cheap.

[u/JonWood007]

Youre probably not emulating ps3/360 on that, at least not well. Thankfully most games have been ported to pc and the machine should run most if not all of them. That gpu looks pretty weak for that system. Should run 360/ps3 pc ports well but might struggle with ps4 era games. You'd wanna upgrade the psu and maybe get a better card there. You can put a pretty respectable card in that machine and it will be pretty balanced. Maybe look for a cheap rx 580. Edit if going low profile maybe a 3050 6 gb if you wanna splurge. Even a 1030 (ddr5) should be an improvement over the 350x though.

[u/RLZT]

Also I should add that both the GPU and CPU are DDR3 and the GPU is low profile

[u/Responsible-Hunt7591 → u/RLZT]

any chance you could upgrade to a GTX 1060 or RX 570/580?

[u/RLZT → u/Responsible-Hunt7591]

Maybe in a few months, it will cost me the same I paid for basically the rest of the rig lol

[u/Nierkatt27]

To answer your main question: if you get a working motherboard, that i7 4770 actually still holds up surprisingly well. I used to run an i7 4790 (basically the same chip) paired with a GTX 1070, and I was able to play ARC Raiders fine, which is a demanding modern title.
​The main bottleneck in your setup won't be the CPU, it's going to be that Radeon R7 350x. That card is going to struggle hard with heavy PS3 emulation (RPCS3 is very demanding) as well as PS4-era and modern games. If you want to emulate PS3/360 and play modern stuff smoothly, you'll definitely need to upgrade the GPU to something like a GTX 1060/1070 or better down the line, and aim for 16GB of RAM in dual channel so games don't stutter

[u/RLZT → u/Nierkatt27]

I bought it with batocera CRT/emudriver in mind, I needed something with an analog video output to play at most PS2 games, I will think of upgrading to something better soon

[u/ju2au]

What do you mean "no image"? Did it boot or have a "beep" sound?

PCs of that vintage almost always have a PC speaker wired to the motherboard that will give you "beeps" to indicate it's startup status.

Have you tried booting up without that R7 350X GPU? Remove that GPU and try just using the in-built integrated graphics from the i7-4770 and get everything working first.

Often, for troubleshooting if PC is unresponsive, I'd remove the RAM and reseat them back into their sockets. That seems to get them going more often than not.

The fact it is a i7-4770 with 8GB RAM, you need a low-profile GPU and the PSU is 250W makes me think that you must have got a Dell or HP prebuild. Those are almost everywhere. I got a Dell i7-4770 for free last year. Put in ab AMD R7 430 2GB GPU and handed over to my niece for her to play some Minecraft (Java).

[u/RLZT → u/ju2au]

Yes, it does have a beep sound sometimes, mostly when I fuck up something, but I heard it very few times and any with the GPU.

Without the GPU is working mostly fine except for being unable to acesse BIOS ou UEFI settings, even through windows.

It does looks like a refurbished OEM, it has a Intel motherboard that sincerely makes me a little sad is not working, because it has 4 ram slots, but it is simply impossible to find a driver to them because Intel deleted them all when the support ended

[u/ju2au → u/RLZT]

Instead of Windows, you could try a Linux distribution like Linux Mint and then use something like FWUPD to find the latest BIOS for your motherboard.

https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd

[u/BehrtRavn333]

I have a I7 4790 with 32gb Ram and an RTX 2060 12gb..and I can play damn near anything on it. Some really heavy graphics games only get like 30-40 fps but it's still good.