Our cabinet is a Skillshot FX, purchased in 2021. The story behind it is that my wife was looking for something for our family's pandemic self-care, and had started looking for a Skee-Ball machine. She discovered that the Skee-Ball company also made a pinball cabinet, and in its Pinball FX3 selection, it had both some original tables and some classics like Funhouse. And it's beautifully constructed, looking more like a piece of nice wooden furniture than a pinball table. We had to buy it.
After we got it, we enjoyed its selection for a while, and we added Pinball FX to it when that was released, to build our library more (including two favorites, Star Trek TNG and Addams Family). It was still missing some tables we wanted, though, and that's when I discovered VPX. It took a little work to get it running, and some good information from this community, but now we've got three apps for playing pinball both old and new.
Pinball FX is a bit of a strain on the hardware, though, and a couple of the more recent VPX tables also have some heavy scripting that it struggles a bit with. So it's time to upgrade. It doesn't help that the CPU isn't supported by Windows 11, and since FX/FX3 run on Steam and thus require Internet access, we're not going to leave an unsupported Windows 10 on it for longer than we have to.
Since I haven't built any sort of desktop PC since before smartphones were invented, I have no idea what modern hardware looks like, or how much to buy. We're not playing COD or the new Dragon Age on this thing, but we'd like something that's more than good enough to play pinball on for years to come.
The current specs, which were perfectly good to run FX3 in 2021, but are starting to show their age:
CPU: AMD FX8800P Radeon R7 12 core 2.10GHz
RAM: 32GB DDR3
Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (2 displays -- just table and backglass, no DMD)
The current motherboard is a mini-ITX, but the case frame looks like it would be able to handle anything up to a full ATX. Probably going to need to switch that out to accommodate a modern CPU.
It currently has a SATA hard drive, but that can be replaced with an M2. Just need Windows, a Steam client, and copy over the current VPX install.
The other hardware and wiring (like for the buttons) can stay. It's just the PC components that need replacement.
I'd prefer an AMD CPU, and our budget is $1k-$3k. Preferably near the lower end, of course, but we're willing to make this thing work well by spending money. However, we also don't want to overkill things.
Any suggestions from folks who have recently built a PC for their cabinet?
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