Ever wonder about the true potential of those PCs used as 3D dental scanners in your local dental clinic? Three days ago, Redditor u/AfternoonPutrid8558 on the r/PCMasterRace subreddit shared a captivating story along with a set of remarkable photographs. This was made possible as he was granted brief after-hours access to his father's dental clinic. The main limiting factors here were the limited time and free storage, with a 100 megabits per second download speed, which made some larger game installs unfeasible within the given time window.

Uncover the Hidden Potential of 3D Dental Scanners

Gaming on a Dental Computer

This system utilizes a Haswell-E 5th Gen Intel Core i7-5720K paired with an MSI Raider X99 motherboard, operating at 3.3 GHz and equipped with 32GB of DDR4-2999 RAM. These are indeed older specifications, as the CPU and platform date back to 2014, just after DDR4 was initially adopted. Surprisingly, they remained more than adequate for gaming until around the PS4 era. In today's gaming landscape, where newer games have become extremely demanding on CPU and GPU requirements, the relatively low power of mid-gen PS360 and PS4/XB1 allowed many older PC architectures to remain competitive in multi-platform titles for a much longer time compared to when games constantly pushed the limits with each CPU/GPU refresh cycle.Although we don't know the exact GPU used within this 3D dental scanner, the system information at least reveals that it is an AMD Radeon R9 200 series GPU. It could potentially be a Radeon R9 270X, 280X, or 290X. While these cards may not compare to AMD's current RDNA GPU offerings or even old budget staples like the RX 580, they are more than sufficient for indie games and older, less demanding titles.u/AfternoonPutrid8558 tested these specifications in two popular games. The first was a classic multiplayer shooter released in 2004, Counter-Strike: Source, which ran at an astonishing 600-700 FPS, making full use of the onboard CPU. The second game was an underwater survival game released in 2014, Subnautica. Subnautica still achieved a respectable 60 FPS, being about ten years newer but still designed to work with a wide range of GPU specifications. u/AfternoonPutrid8558 also mentioned that the sea moth controls in Subnautica feel "surprisingly elegant" when operated with the large trackball mouse used by the 3D dental scanner. However, we can imagine that these controls would be much less elegant in a multiplayer match of Counter-Strike, regardless of the high FPS.