Or just stick with Adam Moore3's setup—an Athlon 840 and an NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti. Personally, I wouldn't go overboard with anything more than that. The real question is whether kids even have hardware like that at home; who knows what they're actually playing these days?
It looks like there’s a decent amount of dust buildup. You should probably give it a good cleaning (or hire someone who can) and swap out the thermal paste.
Freezing isn't always the GPU's fault. You should probably run a check on your drives first—use something like HD Tune to run an error scan and check the drive health.
It could also be an issue with the game itself (try a reinstall) or even just your network connection, like high ping or server-side lag.
They’ve been running low for a while now, and most of the time they’re just completely out of stock. What we’re seeing right now is basically a clearance sale to move the remaining inventory. The real question is how much—if anything—will actually be left on the shelves in a month or so.
How exactly do you plan on swapping it out? If they actually approve the warranty claim, I mean. Because if we're talking raw performance, you’d basically be looking at a sidegrade, if not a slight downgrade overall.
Have you tried testing different drivers yet? You should probably wipe the old ones completely using something like Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) first.
It’s a pretty narrow field when you're comparing the Trion 100 and the Trion 150. 😁 Basically, most of these newer budget drives are cut from the same cloth. You really have to weigh the price against capacity, warranty terms, and actual user reliability feedback.
The Adata SP550 240GB is sitting at $155... Also, that AMD R3 SSD looks like a solid little budget pick.
EDIT
Actually, this one is technically the cheapest option out there (links)
analogtiger19 said:Buying anything in the next 30 days—before the next generation of GPUs hits the market—is honestly a waste of money... unless your life literally depends on it, then go ahead and pull the trigger. ☕
It seems like anyone eyeing an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, an AMD Radeon R9 380 (especially those 4GB models), or even a 380X would be just as smart to hold off. That goes for the high-end crowd looking at the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 or Fury cards too... It’s probably not that the new stuff will be faster than what’s out now, but rather that the new cards will absolutely crush the current ones in terms of pure value and price-to-performance ratio.
The folks over at PC Gamer are making the exact same point.
Especially if we see another mid-range Polaris 10 card coming out that's even cheaper than the 480. If that happens, it'll definitely land right in the same price bracket as the AMD Radeon R9 380.
Look at the benchmarks. You can't even put them in the same category; that Pentium N3700 is just a low-power SoC. Performance-wise, it’s sitting right up there with my ancient Sandy Bridge Celeron B800, which was already bottom-of-the-barrel even years ago. In my opinion, it feels way too weak for today's standards, and I’d avoid it if you have any other options.
It features a more powerful CPU and an entry-level dedicated graphics card, all while being more budget-friendly. You should get a 1-year warranty for business purchases and 2 years for individual consumers (you can always double-check that via email).