Of course, unless you can score a decent CPU and motherboard combo on eBay for cheap—that would actually be a better value than buying new parts from China.
N/A, the HD 7770 isn't even that impressive $100. If you happen to stumble upon a GTX 660 or an HD 7850 2GB for $133, grab it. I only picked this one up because the price was low and it doesn't require a massive power supply. I definitely wouldn't trust any card pulling over 100W to a cheap generic power supply from a big-box retailer.
Honestly, you’re much better off avoiding those integrated graphics combos altogether. Instead, grab this, order a new Chinese generic motherboard with a socket 1155 from one of those sites (you know the ones), and then for the grand finale, snag a used GPU for around 300-$133. It’ll be incomparably more powerful than any integrated chip—even beating out an R7 250. Click (looks like this one might even be cheaper). For older games, it’s a total beast; obviously, it won't handle modern AAA titles, but they aren't exactly breaking the bank either.
Plus, you actually leave room for upgrades. You could eventually pick up an Ivy Bridge i5 for about 300-$133, which offers way more gaming punch than a quad Athlon or those old Phenoms. From there, you can always drop in an even beefier graphics card, provided your power supply can handle the load.
If you go the Athlon route now, you're basically stuck in a dead end. You'll have zero upgrade path, mediocre performance, and it won't even save you any money in the long run.
Even a quad-core running at 3.5~4GHz isn't some fragile little chip; until just recently, similar i7 processors were priced at least at $833, widely regarded as high-end hardware and total overkill for gaming. This thing can easily be paired down the road with something like a GTX 1070, or even a beefier GPU at higher resolutions (sure, the R5 1600 is the better value here, but we're talking about what happens if someone actually needs integrated graphics)
It’s doable, though I can't say for certain how Windows will handle things or what might happen to the files on your other partition. Honestly, I don't recall ever performing this kind of operation while partitions were already populated. Regardless, you should always back up anything important on those drives just to be safe.
Type "disk management" into your Windows search bar and see if that partition shows up there, along with whatever status it's displaying.
Otherwise IMO, you probably shouldn't have partitioned a 120GB SSD like that; it's just too small, especially when you're carving out space for the OS.
Based on that video, I wouldn't say so, though the 4GB of RAM might be the bottleneck here. As far as the GTX 1030 goes, it can manage to scrape by at 1080p on low settings, or perhaps 720p on low to medium.
To be honest, even that first option is total overkill for you. You could easily upgrade your GPU down the road, and those aren't cheap. If budget isn't an issue, go with the third one—it comes with a 5-year warranty. Just a heads-up though: I’m not sure if you’d handle the claim through the retailer after the initial two years; you’d probably end up shipping it directly to the manufacturer yourself.
wiredotter14 said:Yeah, having a VRM cooler is definitely a plus.
I went with the ASUS because the motherboard's support page explicitly states it handles 3200MHz RAM speeds for both AMD Ryzen and AMD Ryzen APU. In contrast, this Gaming 3 board lists 3200MHz for standard Ryzen, but drops down to 2400MHz for the AMD Ryzen APU.
I didn't realize there was such a gap in RAM support between the APU and the standard Ryzen chips, and I didn't catch that detail on the link provided either. 🤷
Regardless, even if there is a difference, I suspect it’ll all level out once you start tweaking things in the BIOS. Honestly, there isn't much price difference between 2666MHz and 3000MHz kits—you can often find 3200MHz kits for the same price anyway, so it's a wash.
Regarding the boards—does it matter to you if the PC footprint is smaller (using an mATX board and a compact case), or are you indifferent? If you want a smaller build, grab that ASRock B350M Pro4. If you prefer ATX, go with the Gigabyte or the MSI Tomahawk based on what's currently available and priced well on Newegg. You could certainly spend more, but there's really no reason to; I highly doubt you'll ever need Crossfire/SLI (running dual GPUs) for your use case, nor will you be pushing future 8-core models through extreme overclocking.
Let's look at it this way: if someone wants a laptop specifically for gaming for $1267, they could pick up a unit with a noticeably better GPU—like an MX150—but you won't find the 4c8t, 16GB RAM, SSD+HDD combo, or that 17.3" IPS screen unless it's brand new with a full warranty. If they need a more powerful CPU for $1467, they're looking at laptops with an i5-8250U, which still lacks the SSD+HDD setup and 16GB of RAM, though again, it comes new and under warranty. For $1533, you're seeing the same CPU paired with an MX150 and so on. So, in my opinion, maybe $3,500-$$1333 is the ceiling given everything else included. It’s worth the money, but potential buyers have plenty of other solid options out there.
I’d honestly just go with a board that has a decent heatsink; there isn't much of a price difference anyway.
Keep in mind that the last two options require an ATX case—something like a Corsair ATX (since the Z1 neo looks way too unprofessional for an office setup).
Selling an older PC can be a real grind—it took me about 2 to 3 months just to move my setup, and that was a pretty easy sale. Yours might fetch somewhere around 1,000 and change, maybe $400, and you could definitely probably get $133 for the GPU, or even try for 500 if you're feeling lucky.
CPU might run around $1,000-$400 Motherboard - roughly $167 RAM - $117 GPU - $1,300-$500 SSD - $300-$133 Hard drives - maybe $150 for a 1TB $67, or about $100 for a 500GB $50
Look, if "office apps" just means running Microsoft Office and a web browser—which seems to be the case here—you could honestly just grab a Pentium Gold for like $40 and call it a day. Or, you could build a much cheaper setup around an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G and pocket the extra cash. Honestly, take that saved money and go crazy on a high-end monitor instead. This is it.Honestly, that figure isn't even that crazy when you consider it’s a 32" display with 1440p resolution. It's actually pretty solid.
You might want to check out AliExpress or Amazon. Honestly, if you hunt around those sites, you could probably snag a much more powerful older Intel processor for next to nothing, then just flip your current CPU to recoup some cash.
I'd argue the 2200G offers better value for your money, though the 2400G gives you a noticeable boost in integrated graphics performance along with SMT (8 threads).