This is a bit of an updated post for some hardware that sort of fell into my lap that I’m trying to decide what to do with. I found a rig on the trash that has a GTX 970 and after taking off the cooler I learned it has an i7 4790 CPU. For the time it came out, this was pretty top tier hardware, but obviously today it’s dated.

So I was thinking of doing a living room emulation build with this, for games up to wii/PS2, and maybe some older PC games as well. I was originally thinking of going with batocera, but considering I would like to do retro PC gaming as well, I’m not sure this is the best option. I don’t know if bazzite would be the best option either, since that usually focuses on modern pc gaming.

So any thoughts on the best software for this rig, for the uses I’m thinking?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    Memory is going to be the big decider, and the GPU will be the weakest point for gaming. Nvidia is also probably dropping GTX hardware in the rolling driver updates next year-ish.

    If you’re talking about gaming, all distros will be the same, as they are in any other metric aside from memory consumption (there are some tuned distros meant for low memory consumption). As long as it has 8GB of memory, any distro will be fine.

    • korendian@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      4·
      3 hours ago

      Between the two computers (because I have two older systems I found to work from), I have 40gb of ram, but obviously not all of that will fit in one system. The best ram I have speed/size wise is 16gb of ddr3 1866mhz fury hyperx. That was what I was thinking of using for the gaming system. So I should be good in the memory department.

      If they are dropping GTX driver support, what would you recommend I do?

      • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        16GB is plenty, so just install whatever distro you want.

        Re: Nvidia - They’re not dropping it entirely, meaning the drivers stop working, they’re just not going to be including fixes for older devices in the rolling releases anymore. Those cards are almost 10 years old, so that’s not shocking at all. For $40 you can get a card 2x as powerful as that one right there.