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?


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.
You don’t need “Game Ready” drivers for the newest release to play an old DX11 game or run an emulator anyway