Upgrading the arcade cabinet PC - options?

[alex2005]

I have a Sega Blast City with CRT Emudriver, Windows 11 and the following hardware:

- Intel 4790K
- motherboard Gigabyte B85m-d3h
- Graphic card Sapphire 7850 HD with modified bios for 15khz (connected to the Sega Blast City VGA with a DVI-VGA adapter).
- 24 GB RAM DDR3
- 2TB SSD (x2)

And plenty of emulators with Hyperspin (Model 2, 3, Mame, retroarch, RPCS3, Xbox and several PC Games)

What I also like from my current setup is that I am able to change the boot logo of the motherboard, so I replaced the default Gigabyte logo with a nice and clear Sega Blast City logo.

What I am thinking is to upgrade my PC. I could keep the SSD and the probably the graphic card (unless you tell me there is a  better option), but the rest I would like a change for a less power / noise / heat / consumption and more single core performance, so I was thinking of a Ryzen 5700G or similar. I guess I will  still need an integrated GPU in the motherboard as I'll need to do the W11 and CRT Emudriver setup from scratch.

What setups do you guys have, any recommendations? If you have a modern setup, have you been able to modify the bios boot logo as well? Reading here and there, seems unlikely the case in modern motherboards.

Thanks for the support,

[Calamity]

Hi Alex,

I wouldn't touch that PC. Even in 2025.

If you really want to upgrade, specially with that Ryzen 5700G, then you should definitely leave Windows behind and move to Linux (Groovy Arcade). That means no Hyperspin (which honestly I'm surprised it's still around). The thing with the 5700G is that it's an APU that is directly supported for 15 kHz through DP->VGA adapter. You could still use your 7850 although I doubt the new motherboard uefi will show through the modded bios.

[alex2005]

Thank you Calamity for the advice.

At this point, if I wanted to stay with Windows, would there be any better option? I've got plenty of 2D PC games Windows-only

If possible I would want to stick to Windows and Hyperspin (it is the only solution I have found that is 15khz config friendly, I am not even using rocketlauncher since the UI displays as crap at 640x480 making it unusable, so I add/modify systems and themes by editing only config files and modules). I have about 80 systems there so a change to something different than HS is something I would want to avoid (I have no plans to even upgrade to Hyperspin 2, not to mess with it again) 

Maybe for the BIOS boot I could eventually disable the boot display logo, in case it is not possible to modify it.

You're probably right. If things work, better not touch anything