Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, we have this v4 Xeon / RX580 build, the meta budget build of a few years ago, and see if it’s still hanging in at the end of 2025, or if it’s going badly wrong, like the end of 2025.
I call this build Ambiguous Codex, because why not, that’s why. It’s using one of these relatively cheap Chinese special X99 (or so they claim) motherboards, in this instance a MOGUL X99 paired with 2 8GB sticks of DDR4 at 2400MHz and the Intel Xeon E5 2650 V4, a 12-Core, 24-Thread part that clocks at 2.20 GHz with a turbo up to 2.9 GHz. This is a slight step down from the 2680 V4 I’d normally go with, in an attempt to see if it still holds it’s own while keeping costs down.
The single thread performance of these older parts is on paper the Achilles heel of it, it’s score of 41 in Cinebench 2024 being less than half the speed of modern chips, but the multi-core score of 573 is quite competitive. As more game engines move from relying on single thread speed to being more heavily multithreaded, I’m curious to see how this is holding up.
The other load bearing part we want to investigate is this SOYO AMD Radeon RX580 2048SP 8G. Another budget champion, this China-focused SKU has fewer stream processors than the full fat 580, putting this arguably closer to a RX570, but lets see how it’s performing in the benchmarks and if that 8GB carries it.
Whistlestop tour of the other component first, this has a Thermalright SI-100 cooler that’s overkill for this really, there’s a 512GB CUSU NVMe SSD that’s performing as you’d expect, very fast, backed up with a 1TB hard drive that’s also performing as you’d expect, less fast. The PSU is an entirely adequate but unremarkable Aigo AK 500W, and the case is an iONZ mini tower with no obvious model name, but it’s easy to build in and decent value, including these ARGB PWM fans.
Miscellaneous build notes – the white GPU was a choice of necessity as in it’s what I have on hand after its equivalent black cousin started crashing under load, and I think it just about works with the right choice of system lighting. You are welcome to your own opinion on the aesthetics.
The thing to watch with all these Chinese X99 motherboards is that I assume due to red communism, while this looks like a USB3 header it is in fact wired to a USB2 controller, just like it’s comrade port next to it. I don’t think USB2 speeds are acceptable in space year 2025 so I’ve solved this problem by – how else – good clean Western Capitalism, baby, by, er, buying more parts from China. In this instance, a PCIe riser cable to clear the graphics card fans, and a pcie to USB3 card that provides five ports on the back and a header for the case port.
In the not particularly interesting synthetic benchmarks, Time Spy gets 4328 points, Fire Strike 11081 points, and Superposition 5334 at 1080p High settings, but let’s see how this CPU/GPU combo that’s getting on for ten years old handles proper vidja games.
Older games perhaps unsurprisingly are no issue for the RX580, with Shadow of the Tomb Raider getting 65 fps at 1080p High Settings. It was an AMD flagship back in the day after all. Counter Strike 2 is a fair bit harder to run than the older Global Offensive, however this can still return 73 fps at Very High settings, and so will be able to drive higher framerate displays at lower settings. I’ve not tested the other popular eSports or more scalable titles, but I’m confident it’s going to run the likes of DOTA, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite in performance mode perfectly well.
But I think we all expected that it could run these. Let’s throw some more problems at it. Obviously ray tracing is out of the question, but Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p low settings which does have a bit of automatic FSR gives 58 fps on the benchmark, but is arguably missing out on the bulk of the eye candy that makes Cyberpunk Cyberpunk, but it is at least possible to get some playable experience from it.
Unreal Engine 5 is the performance boogeyman of 2025, and isn’t doing all that well with the even the highest end systems. If you’re set on playing these games with a 580, we’re going to have to enter special measures. Without any upscaling or frame generation tricks, unrealistic to expect much I know, but even so Black Myth Wukong gets only 17 fps at 1080p High settings, and Marvel Rivals is barely any better at 29 fps for 1080p Medium settings. If you want playable framerates, for given values of playable, Black Myth Wukong gets to 60 fps at 1080p Low, without any Framegen, but with a 50% FSR value which much like Cyberpunk is quite a hit to the visuals. Marvel Rivals is even harder to beat into submission, getting only 49 fps at 1080p low, performance settings & FSR applied, or 78 fps with the helps of some frame generation, so if you can deal with the added latency that’s an option, but I’d argue this is exactly the sort of game you don’t want more latency in.
Call of Duty Warzone stopped working for a few weeks, giving DirectX errors, but it’s currently back on line and gets into the mid eighties in average fps at 1080p performance settings, a perfectly playable experience although do bear in mind if the developers do enforce the need for secure boot in future versions this motherboard doesn’t have the TPM chip to enable that, so that’s a possible issue for this and other games with anti-cheat systems.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage gets 59 FPS average at 1080p High settings, albeit with some stuttering and texture pop in I think from loading off the hard drive. I expect this could be alleviated by running it from the SSD or dropping the quality settings a bit, but it’s certainly going to be a very playable game with a smidgen more tweaking than I had time to give it.
Horizon Zero Dawn is in a much better state now than it was on launch, but it’s still my representative “poor playstation port” pick. It’s favour quality setting looks very nice and gets a playable 52 fps, or if you must have a 60 fps+ experience then the “original” setting gives a 63 fps average and still looks quite nice indeed.
Red Dead Redemption 2, gets an average of 53 fps at 1080p, with the settings slider at the lowest of the balanced settings which I feel is pretty solid although if you do want a closer to 60 fps experience then adding in the quality FSR brings it to 59 fps while still looking almost as good as native, and I think I prefer that in games like this that aren’t sweaty twitch shooters that want all the frames. Another good outing for the system.
Forza Horizon 5’s auto-detected settings at 1080p went for its medium preset with Vsync, which did deliver a close to locked 60fps run with plenty of GPU power headroom left, so it’s able to get through 1080p run at high settings at a 58 fps average and very barely any more stuttering so a pretty good experience with this game.
You can come to your own conclusions on this, of course, but for me this is still just hanging on as a viable budget build contender in the here and now, but modern engines are very much pushing against the limits of what this combination can do. If we see more titles where ray tracing is required, such as the latest Indiana Jones and Doom games, this little guy just isn’t capable of doing it, and these ports of PlayStation titles and Unreal Engine 5 games just don’t seem to prioritize optimizations for PC hardware. Particularly sad in that if that becomes the new normal, it’s adding at least an extra £100 to the bill of materials for a build, probably closer to £200, and that’s really going to start pricing people out at the low end.
Still, for a good chunk less than the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, this can provide a great gaming experience across thousands of titles, while also giving access to all the rest of the potential that PCs have. I think it’d be interesting to see how low we can get a somewhat newer AM4 system with a 2000 series graphics card – if you’d like to see that or have any other thoughts comment below, and until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.