RocketSci

Thanks for that, but particularly for a GPU, we're not too keen on the idea of buying a refurb -- what did the prior user put it through before retiring it? No matter how good the refurb job is.

Thank you. That is precisely the advice that I needed on the GPU. The playfield is 2k/60, so that would be a 3060. I had posed this same question to our gaming community at work, and the recommendation coming out of there was also a 3060. If I'm hearing the same thing from two people in very different settings, there's probably quite a bit of merit to that advice. They also recommended a Ryzen 5 9600X, which the bottleneck calculator says would work fine with a 3060, but it would hold a 4060 back. Pretty much any CPU that would do justice to a 4060 feels like it would be overkill for what we're doing with this system. I'll need to play with the combinations and numbers some more, but I'm a lot closer now than when my wife and I decided that we needed to do this. Thanks again!

That's correct. Just gutting the PC components and keeping everything else. Since the cabinet has already been built, replacing the displays would require finding new ones that are the same measurements, and we're more than happy with the way the current ones look. Thanks for the suggestion of putting the OS and apps on the M.2. Like I said, I haven't built a desktop in decades, and my day job has me working with rather more abstract compute components, when I'm thinking about it at all. And thanks for the hardware list -- I've gotten some other suggestions, and I'll look them all over and see what works best for availability and our budget. I'll follow up here once I've figured everything out!

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.