Gaming PC build under $3500 (no peripherals)

So, a buddy of mine wants to play Call of Duty, Middle Earth: SoM, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and stuff like that, but his current rig is totally struggling—he's stuck on medium settings with constant stuttering. He’s got an HDD and 8GB of RAM he can reuse, and his budget is capped at $350. Should he just grab a GTX 1050 Ti to pair with that build crimsonstag84 suggested in the other thread, since he won't need to shell out for more RAM?

Dell Inspiron 12cm case cooler
Corsair ATX power supply, 85% efficiency, active, bulk
Intel Core i3
ASUS Motherboard (SAM4, 2xDDR4, PCI-Ex16, 2xPCI-Ex1, USB3.1, USB2.0, 4xSATA III, M.2, Raid)$169
Alienware Aurora case without PSU
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

If my math is right, that should still fit within his budget.

Corsair ATX power supply, 85% efficiency, active, bulk
Intel Core i5 Alienware
Alienware Aurora case (no PSU included)
MS PC COOL 12cm case fan (mount this on the front panel)
ASUS Motherboard (AM4, 2xDDR4, PCI-Ex16, 2xPCI-Ex1, USB3.1, USB2.0, 4xSATA III, M.2, Raid) - $171
Samsung SSD 120GB A400 Series 2.5" SATA3

Total: $728

+ graphics card:

https://www.amazon.com/graphics-cards...gddr5-pci-e-30

Everything ~ $1.25

I guess if you have some DDR4 RAM and a SATA drive lying around, you could probably make use of them.

crimsonstag84 said:So, I'm guessing it’s running on DDR4 RAM and a SATA drive—that's really the only way you can actually make them useful.

Given what was stated above:

Grace Murphy92 said:So, this guy wants to play Call of Duty, Lord of the Rings, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and stuff like that. Fine. My current rig just can't handle it anymore. He’s running them on medium settings with constant stuttering. It’s got an old hard drive and only 8GB of RAM, so he might as well try to make use of what he's got. His budget is capped at $3,500.

Seems pretty likely there's no DDR4 to be found.

Definitely run some checks before you pull the trigger.