Quad-Core AMD Epyc CPUs Can Still Game, It Turns Out

If you’ve ever shoehorned random hardware into a gaming system, this one’s for you. A creative thinker named RandomGaminginHD took a shot at playing current PC games with a rig featuring an AMD Epyc 4124P and discovered that quad-core can still bring it. Despite being an enterprise chip with just four cores (eight threads), the CPU’s test bench put up playable frame rates in a number of games.

The key to making this system, the YouTuber points out, is that the AMD Epyc 4124P is a Socket AM5 chip, meaning you don’t need to put a fortune into either the CPU or the motherboard. The Epyc 4124P has an MSRP of $149, though finding it for sale might involve more poking around than hitting up Amazon and Newegg. Tom’s Hardware noted that the YouTuber combined the CPU with an Asus Prime X870E motherboard, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 to create a scrappy rig.

He then put the computer through its paces at 1080p, typically at medium settings—except for Counter-Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Red Dead Redemption 2, which all had settings at high. The YouTuber supplied a heatsink because the CPU didn’t come with one, but he added that the chip doesn’t run particularly hot and isn’t likely to need an expensive cooler.

The real question here was: Would the processor bottleneck the GPU? As it turns out, the Epyc processor held its own with the RTX 4060. (An RTX 4070 proved to be too much for the CPU.) In Counter-Strike, the processor had no problem at all, offering an average of 269.6fps with the settings on high and anti-aliasing off. That dropped to 96.2fps in Fortnite, 87fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 78.7fps in Red Dead Redemption 2, and 53.4fps in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. The YouTuber even took the PC for a spin in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. (Which, incidentally, looks pretty good but is a whopping $69.99 on Steam. Check out whether your rig can run it with PCMag’s guide.)

You’re not going to seek out an AMD Epyc 4124P for gaming purposes, but it’s interesting to know that a quad-core processor can still provide reasonable frame rates in a pinch. And it goes to show that if you have unused hardware lying around, you might be able to cludge together a serviceable system for a friend or relative.