RyanMacRocks

Thanks for the advice. Any mATX cases in the $50-$100 range you'd recommend?

Gotcha, I figured 500 watts was cutting it a bit close but didn't want to spend an extra $30 to step up to an 80 plus bronze and higher wattage. I may do so now to be safer. Thanks!

Budget (including currency): $600 - $1,000 (not including GPU or peripherals, I will be using my current 1070 Ti and dual 1080p monitors) Country: United States Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: School (MS Office, Zoom, web browsing with 6-20 tabs) Light gaming (CS:GO, GTA V at 1080p 75 Hz) Hi, hope everyone is doing well. I was somewhat active on this forum a few years ago and have built quite a few older systems (dating back to Socket 775). However I have decided it is finally time to upgrade from my i7 4790 system to something more recent for maximum compatibility with Windows 11 and for the improved hardware security of new systems. This will be my first DDR4 build (I'm quite behind) so hoping you could look over my build and let me know if you have any advice. I already have a 1070 Ti that I will be reusing in this build. HDD will not be used for any games, only documents, photos, and videos, so speed does not matter. Would like a decently quick and reliable 1 TB m.2 SSD for my small game collection, suite of productivity applications, and OS. Most of my usage is productivity-based such as college coursework, Zoom and Spotify. Occasionally I'll play GTA V or CS:GO, or a few other older games. Mostly light stuff though. Just want something speedy and reliable, maybe slightly overkill but nothing too pricy. Here's what I have so far:

For sure, I'm buying it for the motherboards but this is just a bonus.

True, hoping for a 7870 or something similar at best considering its dirt cheap. (they have a listing with like 3 AM3 motherboards and a couple 1155 motherboards and these boxes for $75)

Found a Craigslist post advertising some miscellaneous PC parts. Hoping someone could recognize this style of box. Guessing it's a graphics card, but not sure what gen. It's a long shot, but let me know if anyone recognizes the box!

I would add one of the quad or hexa core Athlon IIs and pair it with a GT 1030 or maybe a used 260x. The system is so old that it might be more economical to just start from scratch and buy a cheap used prebuilt with a i5 2400 or something and add a 1030. EDIT: Not sure if a 1030 will work or not. I have had issues with booting a RX 460 in a non-UEFI machine so I'm not sure exactly how that extends to nvidea cards and/or your board.

$500-$700. Can't seem to find any for that price except for the Surface Laptop with 4 gigs of ram

I've been doing some shopping to replace my slightly aging Acer Aspire E5 with a 5200u, but I can't seem to find a single 13" laptop with decent specs in the $500 range. My 5200u still runs decent enough but I'm tired of lugging around a bulky 15" laptop. There are dozens of 15.6" laptops with an i5 8250u and an MX150 for very reasonable prices considering the amount of value per dollar, yet the only 13" laptops I can find are things like the HP Spectre and Dell XPS 13" that run at least $900 for similair specs. (7200u or 8250u). Does anybody know of a laptop with decent specs (not a celeron or pentium) in an ultrabook form factor? Open to Ryzen laptops as well.

Sacramento, know of any good recycling places around here? I do visit the Bay area from time to time so that's an option too.

The lowest end one would have a $15-$20 320 GB drive.

I was going to have a couple of different tiers of PCs, probably the lowest end one with a 1st or 2nd gen i5 and an RX 460 for around $250 and then a higher end option for something like an i7, larger capacity hdd and a 1050 or 1050 Ti.

That's a fair point, my only worry is that the shipping prices might begin to get kind of absurd relative to the cost of the computer.

I'll definitely give that a try. I figured that hard drives would be something I would need, but I can get some 320 GB hard drives for around $20 each and I could even offer 1 TB HDDs or SSHDs as an upgrade option. Those are much more expensive though, usually around $50 for a TB HDD and $70 for a TB SSHD.

OK, I'll have to keep my eye open then. Ideally I'd find a lot of 10 or so to start out with. I don't want to buy too many just to find out that I can't sell them. If they sell really well then I would even consider renting out a small little shop or something.