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I upgraded my HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Office PC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h82p4FyTX3k
TechLabUK
2025-11-03 2026-04-30 In an attempt at getting my project HP Elitedesk 800 G3 PC gaming I decided to give it an upgrade but I may have spent way too much on it.System- HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFFOriginal System Specificat
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In an attempt at getting my project HP Elitedesk 800 G3 PC gaming I decided to give it an upgrade but I may have spent way too much on it.

System
- HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF

Original System Specifications
- CPU: Intel Core i5 7500
- RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4
- SSD: 256GB SATA SSD
- GPU: Nvidia Geforce GT 705 1GB

New System Specifications
- CPU: Intel Core i7 7700
- RAM: 16GB DDR4
- SSD: 1TB NVMe
- GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 6GB LP

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Background Music
- YouTube Audio Library
- Streambeats by Harris Heller: https://www.streambeats.com/

Transcript

0:00 · Okay guys, so today we're going to be giving our little HP Elite Desk 800 G3 a proper upgrade. We've seen what it can do on its own and how it's faster if we removed that old cruddy graphics card that it used to have. And we've also seen how good it is at emulation if we give it a slightly better graphics card.

0:16 · But this time we're going to be giving it a full upgrade because I want to play some real games on it.

0:22 · Now, for those of you that missed our previous videos, this is our little HP Elite Desk 800 G3. It was a system that I purchased for just £50 and probably came from an old office somewhere [music] because this is the type of system offices would have used. You can actually mount the system whichever way you want. You can do it vertically or you could do it horizontally and it looks fantastic either way. I purchased this specifically because of its [music] small form factor size and the fact that I really love the design of the front and I thought it would make a great great games console [music] or something like that to go underneath the TV.

0:53 · Unfortunately though, the specifications inside are not great. It is an older system now running on the Intel [music] thick oral 7th generation. That's pretty much all it can support. And for the CPU, we've got the Intel Core i5 7500.

1:05 · Now, that is a straight quad core processor with four cores and four threads. And they're not the fastest in the world, and modern games have pretty much moved on a little bit from them, but it kind of gets the job done when you're playing older stuff. It also came with a 256 GB SATA SSD, which is actually a bonus point for this cuz it means that it was probably upgraded at some point. Back when this system was released, SSDs probably would have cost quite a bit. So, being an office PC, it probably would have had a hard drive or something like that. [music] It even maybe just a little tiny one like the uh SSD and at some point somebody upgraded it.

1:36 · We also had two sticks of 4 GB of DDR4, [music] which was actually not too bad cuz it meant at least we had dual channel RAM, which is a great feature particularly for gaming. But even 8 GB [music] is really pushing it nowadays, particularly if you want to play anything reasonably modern. In terms of graphics card, this system came with a low profile GT705, [music] which was absolutely horrendous graphics card. You couldn't game on it at all. In actual fact, the performance was half of what the internal iGPU was.

2:01 · The only reason I could think that somebody would install one of them is to get something like HDMI outputs or even more outputs on the system because technically it does come with a bit of a weird flavor here. It does have a VGA port, which we haven't seen for a very long time, but yeah, the system does come with one, and then two DP ports here. The GT75 that was sitting in this slot here probably only provided a HDMI port, or like I say, it probably went to multiple monitors or something at some point, but it was terrible for gaming, and in our [music] testing, the iGPU just completely outperformed it.

2:32 · But we want to upgrade this thing and see if we can play modern games on it. So, to do that, we obviously need some [music] parts.

2:39 · Now, there is a bit of a lackluster part in here and something that's really going to limit how well or how far we can actually take the system. And that, of course, is the power supply. This power supply is a 180 watt, although it is an 80 W or an 80 plus platinum power supply. So, it's a very kind of high-spec model, but it does only provide us with 180 W. And it [music] doesn't have any other additional connections for PCIe or anything like that. So, we're going to be very limited to the graphics card that we could put in here. We could upgrade [music] the power supply.

3:09 · I've seen them and I've actually done it before on other systems, but they are very expensive [music] compared to just being able to go buy a normal power supply. To get a 500 W version of this, which has the extra kind of funny cables you need to be able to get it working, you're talking about 90 on Amazon, and it is kind of like a replacement. [music] It's not a real HP one. For a 400 W, you're talking about £80. So, if you are going to be doing it, you might as well spend the extra £10 and go to the 500 watt.

3:35 · It's going to give you a lot more room.

3:37 · And it does come then with two eight pins. I believe they are pigtailed, but you will be able to get a better graphics card off that. But we're not going to be upgrading that today. We're going to be leaving that in there and we're going to basically try [music] and max this system out based on those types of components. So to be able to do that, of course, we need some parts. And we've got some lovely parts here. The CPU in here or the maximum CPU that we can put in here is an i77700.

4:01 · So I've managed to actually pick one of these up here. This is a four core 8thread processor. So, we now have hyperthreading. It's still very limited in [music] terms of today's modern games. It is going to be probably the bottleneck of the system, but it is the maximum [music] it will take. And these are stupidly expensive to be honest. You can pick them up reasonably cheap if you get a good auction on eBay, but the average kind of buy now price as well as prices on like CEX and things like that are around £40.

4:27 · I absolutely don't think this is worth £40 if you can get away with building or if you are building a new system and you're kind of looking at the platform too, spend the extra to get something else. But if you are trying to max out a system like this, I suppose £40 probably isn't too bad. It's just kind of hurts a little bit to kind of pay [music] that kind of money. But people still want premium for anything that has i7 on it. And of course, this system won't go to an i9 cuz it didn't exist [music] back then. But that is the CPU that we're going to be using. For RAM, we're going to be upgrading it with this Corsair Vengeance LPX.

4:58 · Now, this is DDR4, very easy to obtain and [music] reasonably cheap still. RAM prices are going up, but to be able to get this kit here of 16 GB, two [music] 8 GB sticks, which means we will still have two slots left because it does have four slots on the board. This is actually going to be great for the system. We could leave the RAM in there that's already in there if we wanted to, but I like to just keep RAM matched perfectly all the time. This isn't too expensive. you'll pay around 30 to40 for it.

5:25 · But I think it's going to make a world of difference in here particularly if we are going to be playing modern games cuz 8 GB just really doesn't cut it anymore. So that [music] is going to go into the system too and it's going to look pretty cool cuz it's got some nice heat sinks on it and it's generally kind of typical RAM that people would use.

5:40 · [music] So it's going to work perfectly fine. For storage, we're going to be upgrading that too and we're going to be going faster and smaller. This is the 1 TBTE [music] Crucial P3 drive. Again, they're not massively expensive. You can pick up 1 TB now for less than [music] £50 or something like that. Unfortunately for us, the motherboard does support PCI Gen 3 NVME drives, which is absolutely fantastic. They don't, of course, install things into them when you're in an office environment. These SATA drives would have been really, really cheap at the time. So, [music] we do have a slot underneath it, which means we can keep our SATA drive, too.

6:09 · And of course, we're going to get our operating system running off that. That's going to be a great upgrade, too. And fortunately for us, we also do have the screw for the SATA port there. So, if it doesn't come with one, sometimes they don't. You'll need to buy one or at least get one out of a packet. Usually, if you buy crucial drives, they do [music] come with an extra screw anyway. So, you're going to be good either way. For the graphics card, which is of course going to be the main part of [music] any gaming PC. We are very limited on what we can put in here.

6:36 · We could go for something that is in [music] the low profile format like an RX6400, but because it is a PCI Gen [music] 3 system, it's going to be very limiting. You could go with something older like a GTX [music] 1050Ti or a GTX 1650. You could go a little bit higher in this system, I suppose, to something like a RTX 5050 or a 4060 or a 5060.

6:59 · They actually do low profile versions of them as well, but they all require an 8pin at least connection and of course we're not going to be able to get away with that. So, the perfect option for this system in my opinion is this graphics card here, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050. Now, [music] these are not that expensive at all anymore. I managed to pick this one up a while ago for around £140, which is an absolute bargain for any kind of graphics card.

7:21 · [music] Nowadays, they've gone up a little bit based on the research that I've done, and you'll pay around £150 to £160 [music] for it, but I still think it's an absolute bargain. The cards themselves are not the best graphics cards in the world. We are talking faster than, of course, an RX 6400, an RX6500.

7:40 · They're pretty much kind of like meeting levels of around RX6600 kind of level, [music] but because they are low profile, don't require the extra um additional power. It's probably one of the best options you can go for in a system like this. So, it will actually fit into the system as well. The card is very small. So, I suppose now what we need to do is start tearing this thing down, [music] get that upgrade in, and see how well this system performs. Now, as we showed you before with this system, it's actually very easy to upgrade. They've kind of made it really, really simple. [music] As you can see, the drive that we've got in here at the moment is our Gigabyte 1 TB.

8:10 · That's a games drive that we use on systems to obviously play games, and it means we don't have to reinstall stuff. But what we'll do is we'll remove the front by just taking off those clips there.

8:21 · [music] And then we'll just shunt this system all the way up so we can have a look inside. Changing the RAM is going to be very simple. We just need to take those sticks out. So, we'll pop them out now just to kind of get them out of the way. Then, we need to remove this cover from the CPU. This is a bit of a plastic cover that just basically clicks onto [music] the fan really. It's just held on by these two clips. So, we need to undo them and pull it up. Making sure our cable that is wound all the way around it comes out, too. So, we'll just lift that up there. And we'll just pop those cables out there. Move that to the side.

8:54 · We're going to reinstall this again because we want to keep it in there. It actually allows [music] or helps air flow over the top, get sucked down through the uh heat sink and then blown out the back. If you don't have this in there, it could affect our [music] kind of cooling performance a bit because there's no additional fans in this system or anything like that. But we'll put that to the side. To remove the fan, we will need a funny screwdriver or basically you can [music] get away with a flathead screwdriver. And we're just going to kind of remove everything from each corner. Once this is loosened and taken out, you will be able to see our CPU here.

9:24 · Now, I've already removed the thermal paste from this cuz I've been into the system before, but that is our little i5 7500 there. very carefully want to lower the or increase the arm.

9:35 · Drop up the little plate and [music] take the CPU out very carefully. We don't want to drop anything onto this socket here. And there we go. That is our little i57500.

9:45 · They're still useful for things like uh emulation [music] and stuff like that.

9:49 · But for real gaming, Windows gaming, they've probably seen their best days now. So, we're going to be getting rid of that. And an i7 [music] is probably the least you should ever go now anyway.

9:58 · And here is our i7 7700. So, we'll just drop that down into [music] the system there. Lower the little catch down and plunk it. Just like that. So, that's basically our CPU done. All we need to do now is put some thermal paste on it and [music] put our fan back on. But before we do that, we will install the RAM because it's just easier to access while we're here. The RAM sticks here and here, of course, are going to be running in dual channel, but we're gonna have a lot more RAM. Unfortunately, the speed won't actually increase on this system because it is pretty much locked [music] to 2400 MHz. This does support, I believe, 3,200 MHz, but we're going to be locked down to 24 anyway.

10:30 · So, we'll just drop that into the system here.

10:34 · We'll put one [music] into that slot.

10:36 · Click it down. Little bit of pressure on either side. And we're going to drop this one in here, too. And we'll put that one in as well. A little bit of pressure on either side. And click that one in, too. [music] Now, installing the SSD is a little bit more tricky in the system because it's actually underneath this bay here. Trying to actually reach underneath [music] here to be able to get to the screw is going to be particularly difficult. I'm not even sure you guys can see this on the camera, but what we're going to do is we're going to angle our screwdriver in.

11:05 · And we're just going to basically take the screw out very carefully. It's best to do this with a magnetized screw so you can or screwdriver so the screw stays to it. You don't want to lose that screw there. We'll take the drive and we'll slot it in very carefully.

11:20 · And then we're just going to drop it down. And now we have to tie and get the screw back in. It will go in a bit of an angle to begin with, but you'll need to be very careful on making sure that it straightens up and we don't cross any [music] threads. But there we go. It's caught. And that drive is now installed.

11:36 · So there we go. Now all I need to do is refit the uh CPU cooler and the little block thing. And we're ready to install the graphics card. With the CPU cooler assembly all put back in. Again, we need to install the graphics card. It's a very small graphics card. [music] There's not a lot really to it, but I do like the look of them. You don't get a back plate on them, which is fine because we're going to be fitting them in low profile cases and things like that. The more [music] space that we can acquire for airflow and things like that is better, but it is actually a really nice looking card. It's got a dual fan configuration here and it stays [music] really super cool. So, very easy to install in a system like this.

12:06 · As we've shown you before, what you need to do is pop the clip on the back, remove one of the trays because this is a dual PCI connection [music] card, and we just want to slot it into here. Be careful that we go around some cables, find the slot, [music] and basically just line it up and drop it in. Now, graphics cards like this, like I say, are not the fastest in the world, but they're going to get us gaming, particularly [music] with a system like this. And once we actually get it installed, which is [music] just needing us to move that system around there. There you go.

12:37 · We've lined it up. Drop it into place. You do need to just adjust the back bit a little bit. And then just flip your clip [music] back up. Drop the system down like that. And that is pretty much it.

12:49 · We've got a system now completely built.

12:53 · Everything is looking pretty good. And I actually really like the way that this system turns out with the graphics card.

12:58 · It fits beautifully into this case. It doesn't touch this back frame here. It kind of takes up enough space and it also leaves us two extra PC connections at the bottom if we want to install something like a Wi-Fi card, which would be pretty cool if we were building a games console or something. It does have plenty of space for air flow, but unfortunately there's no fan to be able to do that. So, that's a bit weird.

13:17 · There is a fan inside the power supply, so at least that'll be drawing air [music] in through the system. And this one will be doing the same, too. Of course, this uh graphics card will be doing it, but I'm not really sure where the air is going to be going. It should shoot out the back and out the back of the system. So hopefully [music] everything stays super cool and quiet.

13:33 · Now before we start looking at some of the performance differences, let's take a look at how much we've actually spent on this and [music] what uh price increase we've actually put onto this system. The CPU we actually paid £40 for from eBay. The i77700.

13:47 · The memory we paid £40 for from Amazon.

13:50 · That is brand new so that is not too bad. The NVME drive, the Crucial P3 1 TBTE drive we paid £40 for from Amazon again. And for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 [music] 6 GB LP, which is the lowprofile card, we also can purchase that from Amazon for £160. Like I said before, I purchased mine [music] about 20 cheaper than that a while ago, but nowadays that's roughly about the price you will pay.

14:14 · The original system cost £50, which brings our grand total now to £330, [music] which means with the upgrades, it's six times the original cost that it was. But is £330 [music] actually worth it on a system like this?

14:28 · Uh, probably not to be honest. But £38 is still a cheap gaming PC. If you go out there and try and purchase one, you're going to probably get a lot less [music] specification than this. You still got people out there trying to sell things like second generation i7s [music] and third generation i7s for that kind of money. And for those systems as well, you very rarely get an RTX 3050, [music] particularly one that is so useful like this one that can go in pretty much any system you ever want, even into the future. And of course, it's an RTX [music] card, so in theory, you can do some RA tracing, although you probably wouldn't on this either.

14:56 · When we tested the system in its previous configurations, we did a quick Heaven benchmark that for that we just basically used a 1080p [music] highquality setting just to see where it would land. And with the original system using the GT75, we managed to get an overall score of 97, which was absolutely shocking and terrible. It was a literal slideshow as you were watching it go [music] around and it took forever as well. Taking the GPU out and just using the normal iGPU on the i57500, we managed to get a lot more score here.

15:24 · We actually managed [music] to get 308, which is like three times as fast as the original, which actually showed us that the system [music] was way faster. And we knew at that point that it was going to be much better in gaming. But now with the upgraded system, you can actually get 10 times the original with no GPU performance of a score of 3,167.

15:48 · We are now actually talking about real gaming [music] benchmarks here. Although the Heaven benchmark is a Direct X9 benchmark. It's a little bit old now, but it gave us a good reference point to [music] really show what was going on.

15:59 · We also tested on the original systems that Battlefield 4 is basically the only game that we could literally [music] get playing on the original with the GT75.

16:07 · And even then, it was a literal slideshow again. [music] With that system, we managed to get eight frames per second on average with a 1% low of 7. Okay, that was completely [music] unplayable. And we were running the game in 1080p with a low quality setting.

16:20 · Maybe if we dropped it to 720p, we would have got a better performance, but who wants to play at 720p nowadays?

16:25 · Particularly when you've [music] got a system like this. When we actually removed that graphics card and run it with the iGPU, we actually got a pretty decent performance there [music] of 39 frames per second on average with a 1% low of 30. It meant you could actually play the game, but it didn't look great in a low setting. It just really didn't hold well together. But then of course with the new upgraded system, it has absolutely no issues playing this game even in a 1080p with a [music] low quality setting where we saw five times the performance of the original with no GPU of around 200 frames per second on average with a 1% low of 155.

16:55 · That did mean then that we could actually boost that game up to a high [music] graphics preset and we still got an amazing 100 FPS plus which meant that it's a high FPS experience game now. But that is an [music] older game. Today we want to see if this can play some more modern games.

17:14 · So, let's get it over onto the test bench and see what we can play. Okay, so we've got the system all up and running and it's actually beautifully quiet.

17:21 · It's going to make a perfect system for putting underneath a TV because it's going to make zero noise. It's actually really, really quiet at the moment, but it is idle. So, hopefully that doesn't increase too much when we start gaming.

17:32 · The CPU cooler is probably the worst thing on the whole system when it comes to cooling. But to be honest, even in the previous system with the four core 4thread i7 or i5 7500, it actually kept things really, really nice and cool. And this CPU is pretty much got the same kind of thermal power anyway. So hopefully that will not be a problem.

17:49 · But we're going to actually throw this system right into the deep end and we're going to see can we actually play Doom: The Dark Ages. It is an RTX card, but it's a very weak RTX card. So let's get the game started and see if it actually even loads. The system itself will take a little bit of time to be able to get things running because that CPU is pretty old now. 7th gen has really seen its best days, but it will make a great emulation system afterwards because it's pretty much more than powerful enough to play any emulated system that you want.

18:19 · It's just when it comes to these kind of super new modern games, the ones that have the weird requirements like uh mandatory ray tracing and stuff like that, like Doom: The Dark Ages, where I think it's really going to struggle. But if we can even get the game started and playable in any kind of format, I think that will be a bit of a win. Now, the game is loading up. It's actually started. So, that's number one on the list done. We've actually got this far so far. We haven't actually got to the main menu yet. And I know that this game runs a bit of a dog in the main menu if you haven't got the right configuration.

18:49 · So, I think what we'll do before we get into game is we will go to the configuration and see what it's actually set to. I don't really hold my hopes up to anything over the ultra lowest setting that we could possibly go for.

19:01 · So, we'll configure it that way and then we'll see what that kind of performance is. Like I say, it's taken a while to actually get through these loading screens on a much faster CPU. You will get through this much quicker, but kind of dawling along at the moment. It's dawling along at the moment and it's not really getting a lot done. The CPU is near enough maxed out, so it's definitely doing something. It's probably loading assets and things like that. A lot of these modern games do have these loading screens or or menu systems where everything's active in the background and stuff like that. So, it can take a while for it to actually get there.

19:30 · It is one of the things that you will have to wait for, particularly when [music] you're a a budget gamer like this and you're using a budget system like this. I doubt anybody really with this type of system and specification will be trying to play Doom: The Dark Ages, but it's just interesting to see if [music] it will actually start. So, after a big long wait, we finally got into the menu system here. We're going to have to skip through a few things. I don't know why it's asking me to do this again because we have played this before. It's using my normal save file, but we have actually got into the menu system and things are pretty smooth.

19:57 · I'm not really sure what the settings are, but usually if the system is set to too high for the system specifications, even this menu drags and everything's got a delay. But we'll head over to the settings. We'll go to our display and see what we've got configured. So, we're currently set into a 1080p resolution.

20:14 · Vertical sync is set to triple buffering. So, I think what we'll do is we'll turn that off for now. We'll go down a little bit. We've got a resolution scaling of dynamic. I'm going to turn that off for a minute because we want to really see what things uh happen and stuff like that. We'll go down and we've got a normal upscaler here of TAA.

20:31 · I think what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to go to DLSS. We do have an RTX card so we can go to DLSS. Maybe actually we will go to FSR because we will be able to then use something like frame generation. We'll turn that on and see what happens. FSR 3 with frame generation. We're going to leave the setting. Maybe we're going to go to an ultra performance. Let's just lower it all the way down. Let's throw as many tools as we can at it and see what happens. We'll go down to the normal settings here. And it is set to a custom, but we're going to set that all the way to a low. So, we'll apply those settings.

20:59 · I'm not 100% sure how well FSR with frame generation is going to behave on this system because usually it needs a little bit more grunt. It needs a bit more CPU. It needs a bit more graphics card to get these things done. But, we'll head over to the campaign. And I think what we'll do is we'll start on the first level because that's probably the the best area that we're going to have the best chances going through the game a little bit. You're probably going to find that it gets much more demanding and stuff like that. The game actually loaded really really quickly. So, we'll press the space key there and let's see if we actually get into it. Might take a bit of a while.

21:30 · We've got a nice little loading up screen here that's telling us a bit about the story, but we'll hold the space bar. We'll skip past that. And we are actually in the game. And actually, we've got a pretty decent uh performance here. Let's just reset those stats. And the picture quality is absolutely terrible. There's no way you'd want to play this just like this, to be honest, because it looks so blurry. Everything's really, really blocky. It's actually quite comical. It looks like an old game, but it is running. And we're currently getting an average of 115 frames per second with a 1% low of 74.

22:01 · I'd actually say that this game is now playable at this state as long as we can maintain that kind of performance. So, let's kill a few of these bad guys. We'll head up here and we'll see if we can actually uh get to something a little bit more demanding. I know there's a bunch of bad guys up here soon. So, we'll hit this, hit this, hit this, hit this, and then we'll get past this. There's a big spaceship that will crash at the moment. So, so far everything is still running pretty sweet. We've got a an average of 111 frames per second with a 1% low of 75.

22:31 · [music] And frame generation isn't really affecting our frame times and stuff too much. The latency is not too bad. It's quite responsive. So, I think what we'll do is we'll head over back over to the settings and we'll boost a few things up. It's actually looking pretty good at the moment. So, we're going to go down here. We're going to leave it in 1080p.

22:46 · We'll leave FSR on, but what we will do is we'll boost that up to a performance setting. Hopefully, that will improve the visual quality a little bit. And then when we go down to the rest of the settings, I might try a medium setting.

22:58 · Let's try a medium setting. See if that affects our quality a little bit without decimating the performance too much.

23:06 · Let's go back in there. So actually it's not looking too bad now. Graphically the game is looking better. It's not perfect still, but it is now we do have a slight delay on things. You can kind of see a jutdder in the screen as we turn. We're getting a pretty decent performance though of 65 frames per second on average with a 1% low of 49. But you can you can really feel the difference here.

23:26 · So I think what we'll do is we'll go back over to the settings. Uh I'm not sure which way we should actually take this. Maybe we'll go down to FSR. We're going to leave frame generation on cuz I think that's actually making a big difference here. We'll put that back down to ultra performance and we'll save that. We'll see if that kind of clears things up a little bit. So, things are a little bit more responsive now, but you can definitely tell the the quality isn't 100% there. Although, we are getting a pretty decent performance now of around 89 frames per second with a 1% low of 64. I'm going to head You can see how blurry things are actually.

23:58 · So, what I'll do is I'm going to try and tweak this a little bit further. We're going to go back over to the settings. I'm going to actually set the FSR quality to a balance this time. And then we're going to turn the visual quality down to a low. There is a handheld setting, too.

24:13 · I'm not sure what that would actually do, but uh we'll stick to a low for now.

24:18 · And we'll save those settings. So, hopefully it won't be as blurry and pixelated as it was before because the uh FSR isn't going too low in the resolutions and upscaling. So, but even a low setting on a lot of these new games looks fantastic anyway. And particularly if you've got an old an older system like this, which is very limited anyway, it shouldn't make a difference. So, let's resume the game now. Things are looking much better.

24:41 · Actually, the quality is looking far better now. We can actually see detail in things and everything is still running beautifully smooth. We've got a frame time of around 13 milliseconds, 14 milliseconds, but we've got lots of bad guys here. So, let's kill a few bad guys. See what happens to that performance. We've got quite a bit on screen now and we're coming to get an average of 72 frames per second with a 1% low of 55. This is absolutely amazing. To be honest, I did not think that this system would even get this far.

25:07 · I thought that the CPU would be our biggest downfall here and it would hold that graphics card back by quite a bit, but so far it's actually managing to maintain it really, really well. I think what we'll do is we'll continue on with the game a little bit and we'll see what happens as we go further in. But so far, this is absolutely amazing. You can play Doom: The Dark Ages on an oldie system like this with a total grand total cost of around £330.

25:33 · It will sit underneath your telly perfectly fine. I I don't really know where else to go with this. This is absolutely brilliant. The graphics card is maxed out, but the CPU sitting around 69%. So, we are getting a good utilization on both. So, there we go.

25:48 · Doom the Dark Ages running on my old little system that we've just upgraded.

25:52 · I think it's just absolutely brilliant.

25:55 · So, now that we know that Doom of the Dark Ages does actually run, with a little bit more tweaking, we could probably get a nice average 60 frames per second out of this while increasing that visual quality a little bit. We could probably actually turn the FSR quality up a little bit, stick on our VSync, and we probably get a nice smooth 60 fps and it looks perfectly fine even in a low setting. But, of course, this system now, if it can do this, it can actually play a lot of other games. So, let's take a look at a few of those.

26:37 · Turn up. Let's go. [music] [music] [music] Come on. Let's go.

27:16 · [music] Oh no, let's go. [music] [music] [music] Heat. Heat. [music] [music] Heat.

27:54 · [music] [music] Heat.

28:12 · [music] Hey.

28:21 · [music] So, as you can see from those benchmarks, we've actually managed to turn this system around. It can now play 99% of new games. Not just modern games, but new games. We can play Doom: The Dark Ages. We can play Spider-Man 2. We can play all that type of stuff.

28:48 · The one game that this system really does struggle with, and I didn't include in that because it's just the performance is so bad, was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It is another rate tracing mandatory requirement game, but it's just far too much for the CPU. It just could not handle it. Even in the lowest of settings, even with as many tools that you could throw at it, it was still a very poor performance. But apart from that, if you're not going to play that game, this will actually get most of the job done for you. you will have to do a lot of waiting around.

29:15 · It's one of those things that you don't really notice when you're using new CPUs and the things that are much more higherend, but things like caching your shaders and generating all that kind of stuff takes forever. In actual fact, trying to get things like Hogwarts Legacy running, the shaders took around 15 minutes to actually get done. Once you're in game, [music] it was perfectly fine and everything rendered really well. It had some pretty decent performance. But again, a lot of those games like that one, which are CPU demanding. You do get the worst experience really.

29:44 · Your 1% lows do suffer quite a bit, but it's still quite playable. I'm actually really happy with this system now. I think it would actually make a great system to put underneath the TV. Maybe what I will do with it is upgrade that NVME even further. Maybe take it to a two or even a 4 TB and turn it into like the ultimate emulation system for my home.

30:04 · Get it hooked up underneath my Xbox at home with a controller. and I think I've got a pretty [music] decent system. But anyway, let me know in the comments below what you think of this system. Do you have one similar that you've done similar kind of upgrades [music] on?

30:16 · What would you have upgraded on the system? I mean, we are very limited on where we can go. We pretty much maxed it out. We could have gone with 32 GB of RAM, but it's absolutely pointless really for this type of system. If we did upgrade the power supply, which we could do like I said before for 80 to 90, we could actually get away with putting some like [music] an RTX 5060 in here. But unfortunately, I don't think that would make much of a difference cuz it's really the CPU that's holding us back and that's pretty much as far as we can really go. But there we go. Our little HP Elite Desk 800 G3 fully upgraded playing modern games.

30:47 · Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you like this kind of content. [music] And I'm sure as always, I'll catch you guys in the next one.