Leaderboard

The story starts in 2021, when we needed some pandemic self-care and we had a lot of money that we hadn't spent on vacations. My wife and I had long had a dream of getting a physical Addams Family table, but one in good shape was more than we wanted to spend. We had discovered the Pinball Arcade app for our tablets, so we knew that virtual pinball existed, but playing on a tablet or even a console just doesn't feel the same as standing at a table and slapping the flipper buttons. So my wife went looking for a ready-built cabinet -- we weren't prepared to build a cabinet ourselves. Some of the ones we found looked pretty sketchy, but then we found one built by the Skee-Ball company, the Skillshot FX. It's beautiful, built more like a piece of furniture than a conventional pinball table. It was built on Pinball FX3, a legitimate product. And that collection included some tables that we had fallen in love with through playing Pinball Arcade, like Safecracker. We had to buy it, even though it was still missing some tables that we really wanted (like Addams Family and Star Trek TNG) -- we hoped that the publisher would someday be able to license them. That was 2021. Since then, we've also installed Pinball FX (the successor to FX3), and I had discovered VPX as well. Thanks to some help from this community, I've got a PinballX front end tying everything together. It works...well enough. The PC was more than adequate to run FX3 on Steam in 2021, but now the Steam client is heavier, and FX is a heavier app than FX3, and some of those VPX tables have some pretty heavy scripting. We need to upgrade it, especially since the CPU isn't supported by Windows 11, and we don't want to have that machine on the Internet once Windows 10 goes out of support. Our current setup: CPU: AMD FX8800P Radeon R7 12 core 2.10GHz RAM: 32GB DDR3 Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (2 displays, just backglass and table, no DMD) Our question is what sort of hardware we should upgrade to? I haven't built a desktop PC since before smartphones were invented, so all of the modern hardware is a mystery to me. We need it to be able to run FX3 and FX through Steam, and VPX. It doesn't have to be the absolute best hardware that's available today, but good enough to play pinball well for years to come. We're prepared to spend at least $1k, and would top out at about $3k. Less than $1k would be nice, of course. The preference is for an AMD CPU, but otherwise we're not particular about brands. It's a mini-ITX board, but the case frame inside looks like it could hold up to a full ATX. It currently has a SATA hard drive, but I could replace that with a M2 and just copy everything over to it. Pics or it didn't happen, of course.