How does a 2018 computer fare in 2021?

I had some time today so I played some PC games. Of course it's been a hot minute since I played any game so I had to do a bunch of software updates.

Here's my gaming pc:

More details can be found in the original 2018 post.

After some light gaming, I decided to update all drivers and even the BIOS to see if there's any performance improvement.

Well, good news and bad news.

Good news is my PC is still fairly competent. It's ranked in the 88th percentile in the world, which isn't too shabby. The driver and BIOS updates seems to have improved some performance, especially in the storage area.

Bad news is 2D video performance is severely limited by the Spectre and Meltdown patches Intel and AMD applied to "fix" inherent flaws in their CPU architectures. This almost halved my 2D graphics performance! 😠

This, plus recent "optimized" graphics card settings from nVidia caused my overall graphics performance to slip. My PC is now in the 93rd percentile vs 97th in 2018. To be fair, a bunch of people upgraded their computers as well as bought new, more powerful computers so yeah, my computer is no longer in the top 3% 😤. Eh, it's all good. My games still run decent.

Here's the current performance benchmark:

This system is losing its edge but still decent

In comparison, here's what it used to look like back in 2018 (overclocked of course):

A side effect of updating BIOS is a reset of all my overclocked settings. Doh!

Good thing I wrote down the old overclocked settings for Ryzen 2600 on a Gigabyte Aorus B450 WIFI motherboard. Here it is in case you need it (I'll probably need it later too):

1. Go into BIOS (press Del when the computer starts up)
2. Set CPU multiplier to 40 (default is 3.5)
3. Set Vcore offset: +0.120 (stock voltage is 1.25v so this will bring it up to 1.37v. 1.35 is recommended but I wanted a stable system and have plenty of CPU cooling so I added a bit for more stability). That said, I might drop it down to 1.35v later.
4. Set memory to XMP 1.0 profile, which forces it to run at 3Ghz (rated speed for my memory). I can go further since my memory can handle up to 3.2Ghz, but I prefer stability so this is good enough.

Current specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus B450 Pro Wifi

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600

Memory: 32GB Patriot Viper RGB DDR4-3000

Videocard: EVGA GTX 1070Ti SC Gaming Black Edition

Storage: 

1. ADATA SX8200 480GB NVMe
2. StoreMI array w/ 240GB SATA3 SSD + 4TB 5900Krpm Seagate HDD

Case: BeQuiet Dark Base 700 (inverted)

Cooling: Corsair H110i - Front-mounted with 2 x 140mm fans + 2 BeQuiet 140mm fans in push/pull config.
Cooler Master Fan Pro kit: 1 rear-mounted 140mm + 2 top-mounted 140mm.

Other items:

HP Omen 32" 1440p monitor

Razer Blackwidow RGB mechanical keyboard

Logitech G502 SE mouse

CORSAIR - MM800 Polaris RGB mouse pad

Possible upgrades in the future:

1. RTX 3070 or 3080 (when the current GPU shortage blows over)
2. New motherboard, CPU, and RAM