3rd February 2017, 5:39 PM
That's a pretty solid build, aside from the graphics card. I'll answer that question first. Generally, even now, a dedicated graphics card is going to perform better than Intel's graphics on a chip. That said, Intel graphics has jumped up leaps and bounds since the old days. As for what'll perform better, well, that's a mixed bag. Your dedicated card absolutely will blow it out of the water on games designed around the time that card came out. Newer games? That's where it gets sketchier. Aside from raw clock speed, you have to consider the hardware accelerated graphical features (something most custom PC enthusiasts don't even quite seem to grasp when talking about what'll perform better). Programs like the old 3DMark can only get you so far. If your graphics card tester isn't using modern APIs and current era graphical features, it won't tell you enough.
For example, I "upgraded" from two SLI NVidia 6600s to a single 430 when my PC's motherboard went kaput on me years ago at a time when I didn't have nearly enough money to replace everything, but still needed a functional computer. On paper, those two 6600s should have blown that bargain basement card out of the water, and in older games they did, but in reality that 430 supported far more hardware accelerated processes (like shaders, hardware shadows, that sort of thing) than the 6600s, and ended up outperforming the two 6600s handily in the newer games I was getting. The lower clock speed did mean that I was never going to get blazing FPS, but it was playable, which is more than what I could get out of the 6600s in those newer titles. That 430 actually ended up lasting me for quite a bit longer than I ever anticipated, and I ultimately only just replaced it (and the Core Duo I was running for the CPU) last year. THAT is how long that pair was able to actually play modern games at a playable frame rate (playable here meaning 15-25 FPS near the end, remember I am a N64 veteran). Doom 4 is what finally broke me. Modern games seem to have new rendering techniques to smooth out frame rate such that the game doesn't look "choppy" but instead just plays in extremely slow motion. Going through that first level felt like I'd taken some drug to improve my reaction time 10 fold. It was actually kinda hilariously cheap how easily I could line up a headshot when the enemies were slowly ambling towards me at the speed of a slo-mo action scene in a modern movie.
Point is, your on-chip processor might actually be an improvement in more modern games if Intel's graphics support the various shaders and such the game uses. Give it a try and see how well it does for you and contrast it with how well it performs on older games that only use the shaders your old graphics card was designed for. Ultimately though, you'll want to look at a decent graphics card. NVidia are the champs at the moment, though AMD is making claims that they might actually have a good high-end card that can beat them for the first time in many a year. NVidia does still have one thing AMD still doesn't, and that's superior physics acceleration. AMD can accelerate physics, but they offload some of it to the CPU compared to NVidia's implementation, which does it all on the card. Part of this is a legal issue, where Nvidia bought up PhysX years ago and so kinda own the rights to the technology and so AMD would need to invent some new way to implement it to get around that patent. It's a shame, since that means certain titles that really emphasize various debris effects will just always perform better on NVidia's cards.
My own PC has some pretty high end features now. I don't have a SSD as my main drive (there's one in there, but it's just there as a supplemental drive since it's just far too small to do anything really neat with), but that's my one remaining bottle neck. I've got a 4TB HDD in there right now, and flash just hasn't caught up to that at a decent price. I figure it's a few years out before it hits that point. We're currently sitting at 200GB flash cards available for $70 and 1TB SSD available for about $200, and here I am having filled up about 2/3 of my 4TB drive. I just need it to last me long enough to get to that point so I can move the whole partition over. I'll then replace my secondary 1TB drive with the 4TB so I can have some overflow space. Steam just added the ability to move game installs to different folders without needing to reinstall the whole thing, so I fully intend to make use of that in such a case. I'm worse than you when it comes to keeping my old games installed at all times (well, not quite, I don't hold onto game demos).
For example, I "upgraded" from two SLI NVidia 6600s to a single 430 when my PC's motherboard went kaput on me years ago at a time when I didn't have nearly enough money to replace everything, but still needed a functional computer. On paper, those two 6600s should have blown that bargain basement card out of the water, and in older games they did, but in reality that 430 supported far more hardware accelerated processes (like shaders, hardware shadows, that sort of thing) than the 6600s, and ended up outperforming the two 6600s handily in the newer games I was getting. The lower clock speed did mean that I was never going to get blazing FPS, but it was playable, which is more than what I could get out of the 6600s in those newer titles. That 430 actually ended up lasting me for quite a bit longer than I ever anticipated, and I ultimately only just replaced it (and the Core Duo I was running for the CPU) last year. THAT is how long that pair was able to actually play modern games at a playable frame rate (playable here meaning 15-25 FPS near the end, remember I am a N64 veteran). Doom 4 is what finally broke me. Modern games seem to have new rendering techniques to smooth out frame rate such that the game doesn't look "choppy" but instead just plays in extremely slow motion. Going through that first level felt like I'd taken some drug to improve my reaction time 10 fold. It was actually kinda hilariously cheap how easily I could line up a headshot when the enemies were slowly ambling towards me at the speed of a slo-mo action scene in a modern movie.
Point is, your on-chip processor might actually be an improvement in more modern games if Intel's graphics support the various shaders and such the game uses. Give it a try and see how well it does for you and contrast it with how well it performs on older games that only use the shaders your old graphics card was designed for. Ultimately though, you'll want to look at a decent graphics card. NVidia are the champs at the moment, though AMD is making claims that they might actually have a good high-end card that can beat them for the first time in many a year. NVidia does still have one thing AMD still doesn't, and that's superior physics acceleration. AMD can accelerate physics, but they offload some of it to the CPU compared to NVidia's implementation, which does it all on the card. Part of this is a legal issue, where Nvidia bought up PhysX years ago and so kinda own the rights to the technology and so AMD would need to invent some new way to implement it to get around that patent. It's a shame, since that means certain titles that really emphasize various debris effects will just always perform better on NVidia's cards.
My own PC has some pretty high end features now. I don't have a SSD as my main drive (there's one in there, but it's just there as a supplemental drive since it's just far too small to do anything really neat with), but that's my one remaining bottle neck. I've got a 4TB HDD in there right now, and flash just hasn't caught up to that at a decent price. I figure it's a few years out before it hits that point. We're currently sitting at 200GB flash cards available for $70 and 1TB SSD available for about $200, and here I am having filled up about 2/3 of my 4TB drive. I just need it to last me long enough to get to that point so I can move the whole partition over. I'll then replace my secondary 1TB drive with the 4TB so I can have some overflow space. Steam just added the ability to move game installs to different folders without needing to reinstall the whole thing, so I fully intend to make use of that in such a case. I'm worse than you when it comes to keeping my old games installed at all times (well, not quite, I don't hold onto game demos).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)