My dad's PC is the definition of bottlenecking... help me spec out a better build?

[weery]

As the title says, my dad's home PC is horribly bottlenecked. With a Core i3 2120, DDR3 RAM, a ten year old micro-ATX motherboard, and a Gigabyte Three-Fan GTX 1080 all crammed into a prebuilt-style tower, the bottleneck is legitimately painful. My question was, were he to sell the GPU and build a better all-rounder, what replacement parts would you guys recommend within, or close to, the sale price of a good quality but used 1080?

[GDRRiley]

I'd say keep the GPU and shove a i7 or xeon equivalent in it. assuming your board supports them

[ARikozuM]

Replace your dad and get one from Texas Instruments? /s

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

1080 is still a king.

[betacollector64]

I'd try to get an i7-3770 and make sure the RAM is at least 8GB. If you can't afford that, get an i5-3470 or i5-3570K. It should help your performance immensely. It probably has an HDD too, you should get an SSD.

 

Links I found:

• i7-3770 ($75)
• 8GB DDR3 DIMM ($20)
• 240GB SSD ($40)

[TrainFan475]

1 hour ago, weery said:

Core i3 2120, DDR3 RAM, a ten year old micro-ATX motherboard, and a Gigabyte Three-Fan GTX 1080 all crammed into a prebuilt-style tower

I just died inside

 

Anyway, I would recommend the same thing as @betacollector64

[Roswell]

The 1080 is only worth $250-275. So you can't build much of anything that would do better than what he already has with that. Here are eBay sold listings, ignore the 1080 Ti results:

 

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=gtx+1080&_sacat=0&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1

 

As others said, swapping in a better chip would help. Otherwise a new build would be in order.

[otto1]

Oh god, how did this happen?

1 hour ago, weery said:

As the title says, my dad's home PC is horribly bottlenecked. With a Core i3 2120, DDR3 RAM, a ten year old micro-ATX motherboard, and a Gigabyte Three-Fan GTX 1080 all crammed into a prebuilt-style tower...

 

[weery]

11 hours ago, betacollector64 said:

I'd try to get an i7-3770 and make sure the RAM is at least 8GB. If you can't afford that, get an i5-3470 or i5-3570K. It should help your performance immensely. It probably has an HDD too, you should get an SSD.

 

Links I found:

• i7-3770 ($75)
• 8GB DDR3 DIMM ($20)
• 240GB SSD ($40)

There's already 32 gigs of RAM in it

[Marbo]

There is another option. Sell the 1080 and get a 750ti, no more bottleneck. 

 

But seriously, swap the i3 and add an ssd like others have said