The system requirements for the latest generation of games seem to have exploded, and if we add to that the huge number of problems they carry (from gross bugs to the classic lack of optimization), the feeling is that PC gaming is not going through its best moment.
However, that doesn't stop us from challenging the limits, and in practice we discover that we don't need that much firepower. RandomGaminginHD decided to put this to the test, starting his experiments with a processor that costs just over one euro on the second-hand market…
Forspoken, Hogwarts Legacy, The Last of Us Part I, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall, Starfield, City Skylines II… the market gave us a beating this year, and it's not over yet! Of course, there are some exceptions like Baldur's Gate III and Alan Wake II (which, by the way, terrified us with its minimum requirements), but in general, everything is a pile of "ugh".
Today, games seem to follow one of two paths: they arrive completely broken on our systems (with the promise of 'fixing everything' later) or they demand thousands of euros in hardware to achieve a minimally decent framerate. However…
What can we play with a 1 Euro processor?
… gamers can take another route: squeeze old hardware to the max, see what it can do, and if necessary, explore other catalogs with a couple of years under their belt.
RandomGaminginHD, one of my favorite channels on YouTube, decided to build a gaming PC with the absolute minimum investment, and that's how he got to the Intel Core i3-4170, a 2C/4T processor from the Haswell family that will turn nine years old in a few months.
How much did RandomGaminginHD pay for that processor? Just one pound sterling at CeX (a second-hand store chain), or 1.14 euros at the official exchange rate. But the most impressive thing is that the Core i3 managed to hold its own even with its natural limitations.
While it doesn't make much sense to use a GeForce GTX 1070 in this configuration, in almost all cases, the processor managed to offer a base of 30 FPS. Obviously, the bottleneck is brutal… but we've seen worse.
Warzone maintained an average of 40 FPS, CS2 loses performance as the match extends but its numbers weren't that terrible, GTAV and Minecraft worked very well, and even Cyberpunk 2077 started correctly.
The point is that with a limit of 30 or 40 FPS, the overall experience shouldn't be dreadful… and we're talking about one euro.
