A neighbor has offered me a used Acer Predator G3-710 for $399. The listed specs are an RTX 3060, Intel Core i7-6700 at 3.4 GHz, 1TB of storage, and 48GB of RAM. He mainly wants to run Farming Simulator and handle basic financial tasks, not demanding modern games. The seller hasn't provided much detail, so I'm unsure whether the 1TB drive is an HDD, SATA SSD, or NVMe drive, and whether the RTX 3060 is the 12GB model. Is this a fair price, and are the graphics card and processor still reliable for his needs?
3 Answers
The i7-6700 is quite old by current standards, but that doesn’t automatically make it a bad fit here. Farming Simulator and basic finance software are much less demanding than modern competitive or AAA games, so it should manage them at reasonable settings. Just don’t buy it expecting a strong upgrade path or excellent performance in newer titles.
The RTX 3060 and the rest of the system can be worth around $399, especially if it’s the 12GB graphics card. The biggest thing to check is the storage: a hard drive will make Windows and games feel painfully slow, while an SSD makes the system much more usable. For Farming Simulator and office work, the older CPU should be adequate, but it isn’t a good choice for newer CPU-heavy games.
Before paying, verify the exact storage type, the 3060’s VRAM amount, and how the 48GB of RAM is installed. An unusual memory configuration isn’t necessarily a problem, but mixed or mismatched sticks can sometimes run at reduced speeds. Also check the Acer’s power supply, temperatures, and whether the proprietary case and motherboard make upgrades difficult. If it has an SSD and the PC is clean and working properly, $399 seems reasonable; if it only has a mechanical hard drive, I’d negotiate lower and budget for an SSD.
The processor only has four cores and eight threads, so Windows 11 and newer games can expose its age. For this particular use case, though, steady performance matters more than having a modern high-end CPU.