Around a month ago I made a “best PC from 2012” video… and I kind of lied a bit. I had the i7-3770K (totally period-correct) paired with a GTX 1650 from 2019, and I was hoping the CPU bottleneck would make it feel like the real 2012 king: the GTX 690. So in this video I stopped pretending, went to eBay, bought an actual GTX 690, and ran it through modern games to see if it can still hold onto “usable GPU” status in 2022. Before the game tests, I break down what you’re really dealing with here: a 4-core/8-thread i7-3770K and a GTX 690 that’s basically two GPUs on one card (SLI era), but with only 2GB of VRAM to work with. On paper it can look “not that far off” from something like a GTX 1650, but in real gameplay it’s a very different story—especially when VRAM becomes the wall. In real-world testing, Apex Legends was honestly painful (even with settings butchered), while Valorant was totally fine at 1080p low. Fortnite was playable with low settings and some scaling tweaks, and Sea of Thieves surprised me—70 FPS-ish at 1080p low, and over 100 FPS with aggressive resolution scaling. Pairing it back with the i7-3770K adds some bottleneck in a few titles, but the big takeaway is simple: it’s not “best” anymore, but it’s still cool (and sometimes shockingly playable) for a 10-year-old flagship.