They’re overpriced if you happen to stumble upon some random certified memory; nobody in their right mind is buying that. There isn't much of a difference between those two anyway. I'm guessing you're over in the States?
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is a solid, reliable cooler. I’ve got one running on my brother's Intel Xeon setup (77W) and it’s been working great—super quiet, too.
Honestly, if you want to save some serious cash, just hunt down a used one. The LC option is decent enough.
Adam Moore3 said:Better to cram in an Intel Core i5-7600K with 8GB of RAM instead? 8GB is plenty enough in 95% of cases, and jumping from 4C/4T to 6C/12T is 😲
Side note—it’s insane how many damn builds you can put together nowadays without breaking the bank. 🎉
You're right. An Intel Core i5-7600K is a much better processor, and it matters more than RAM since you can easily add more later. The motherboard has 4 slots, and the CPU comes with a Spira cooler which is way better than the Stealth one.
The first time I built a rig, I went with 8GB, but I had some extra room so I bumped it up to 16GB. With 8GB and the Intel Core i5-7600K, I'd be slightly over budget (not cutting corners on the SSD though).
Your GPU has 1.5GB of memory; everything else is just pulling from the laptop's RAM.
It’s possible that 1.5GB isn't enough, but honestly, I’d bet the bottleneck is either the card's raw power or the rest of the laptop's hardware. 1.5GB is technically more than what that specific card actually needs to run the settings it's capable of pushing.
Adam Moore3 said:That one with the passive heatsink looks even more tiny, at least from the photo. I'm not sure if "low profile" implies some kind of standard set dimensions or what?
This GTX 1050 measures H=37 L=167 W=68.9 mm The GT 1030 is 175x69x36mm I'm guessing they swapped the H and W values.
2.5" and 6.6" works out to 167 and 63.5mm respectively
Best bet is just to measure it with a ruler. The GTX 1050 takes up 2 slots for the outputs (two rows of ports), so you need to check if there's actually enough room in the case for that.
I wouldn't sweat the power supply situation too much.
That 400W rating from the manufacturer is just a suggestion, not the Bible.
The specs say 35W max on the PCIe slot, sure, but these OEM systems usually come with solid power supplies. I'd bet my money the slot can handle 75W without breaking a sweat.
But yeah, the real issue is whether you can actually fit it inside the case.