Half a year ago, an upgrade to NVMe was carried out at a low cost. SMZDM received many suggestions and left behind hesitation about the high cost of graphics cards.
During this period, there were several hesitations about mining cards: 1660s for 700 yuan, 2060s for 1200 yuan, and 3060 for 1800 yuan. There were concerns about testing the mining cards back and forth, but in the end, I still fell into the trap of consumerism and chose the 4060 for the final upgrade on the old platform.
Upgrading and replacing components in a desktop computer is a fun process, just like the iteration of parts on the ship of Theseus. I upgraded and replaced the memory (4+4+8+8), power supply, SSD, NVMe, and fans one by one. I estimate that the graphics card will be the last to be upgraded.
After receiving the product, I uninstalled the drivers and removed the HD7850, then installed the RTX4060 Dual and connected it to the power supply with a 2-pin to 8-pin adapter. It started smoothly and I installed the game-ready drivers.
In GPU-Z, it shows PCIe 3.0 x8, and I ran a simple gpgpu test (without professional benchmarking). It seems to be at the level of the 2060s? I couldn't find any benchmarks for running at PCIe 4.0 x8, so I wanted to see how much performance loss there would be.
I tested the games Horizon 5 and Baldur's Gate 3, and they ran smoothly on high settings. Although Horizon recommended lower settings, even after manually setting it to extreme, the performance was still normal.
The CPU usage is only high during loading, while the GPU usage is high during gameplay. The 8GB VRAM is fully utilized, and I monitored it with AIDA on a secondary screen. I also checked the power consumption of the Wi-Fi socket, and the peak power consumption of the E3 processor and 4060 graphics card is around 230W, which is in line with theoretical expectations. The 400W power supply is not under pressure.
The computer case is the Lian Li PC-K56 from 10 years ago, which is a bit stuffy. It only has front and rear airflow paths. The front Lian Li fan has been replaced with a Lianmin G12, but unfortunately, it is not a 14cm airflow path. The peak temperature of the graphics card is only around 57-58 degrees Celsius, and the fan speed has reached a maximum of 2000rpm, but it is still quiet, possibly due to the thick steel plate. The single fan of the 4060 is sufficient, and even the dual fan OC version is quiet enough.
Finally, I also did a simple test with the Yuzu emulator, and the graphics and frame rates were normal. I can play Switch games smoothly.
I generated an article image using Adobe Firefly, and the effect is cool.