Re-purposing old PC for daughter

[Rdogg9900]

I have an old AMD FX-4300 PC. It has a Sapphire RADEON R7 370 NITRO Dual-X OC 4gb card. 8gb 1600 DDR3 ram. 80gb Intel 320 series SSD. I also have a 500gb usb drive, and a 250gb laptop drive via sata 3. She wants to edit videos taken with her phone and a Canon DSLR camera, and her game recordings from the XB1, so at most 1080p/60fps. She's saved up $300 towars buying a laptop, but If I can find some software and it'll handle the tasks, I'd rather just give her my old gaming rig, so she can worry about buying other stuff she may want. She'd have it hooked up to a 720p TV as a monitor

Will this work for a 15yr old? What is good, hopefully inexpensive software to do video editing on for beginners? Do I need any minor upgrades, or should I just let her blow her money on a laptop? It still runs games like Overwatch at at least 144fps on high/ultra, CoD Black Ops 4 at around 90-100fps.

[Burnedice25]

6 minutes ago, Rdogg9900 said:

I have an old AMD FX-4300 PC. It has a Sapphire RADEON R7 370 NITRO Dual-X OC 4gb card. 8gb 1600 DDR3 ram. 80gb Intel 320 series SSD. I also have a 500gb usb drive, and a 250gb laptop drive via sata 3. She wants to edit videos taken with her phone and a Canon DSLR camera, and her game recordings from the XB1, so at most 1080p/60fps. She's saved up $300 towars buying a laptop, but If I can find some software and it'll handle the tasks, I'd rather just give her my old gaming rig, so she can worry about buying other stuff she may want. She'd have it hooked up to a 720p TV as a monitor

Will this work for a 15yr old? What is good, hopefully inexpensive software to do video editing on for beginners? Do I need any minor upgrades, or should I just let her blow her money on a laptop? It still runs games like Overwatch at at least 144fps on high/ultra, CoD Black Ops 4 at around 90-100fps.

yay! something i can answer well.
 

That GPU looks to be the main bottle neck for everything, what games will she be running? If it's just the games you mentioned then it will be absolutely perfect.

as for video editing software, as a film maker myself i use HitFilm Express, completely free and a good ease in to more professional software. i suggest using that $300 to buy a new monitor and have a dual setup with the Tv acting as a secondary to the new monitor

[Fatih19]

Davinci Resolve is the best free (without asterisks) editing software.

[Rdogg9900]

she might run those games, Fallout:76, and Minecraft. It's mainly video and photo editing she is interested in. She's more in to consoles, because her friends are all on console.

[mariushm]

48 minutes ago, Rdogg9900 said:

I have an old AMD FX-4300 PC. It has a Sapphire RADEON R7 370 NITRO Dual-X OC 4gb card. 8gb 1600 DDR3 ram. 80gb Intel 320 series SSD. I also have a 500gb usb drive, and a 250gb laptop drive via sata 3. She wants to edit videos taken with her phone and a Canon DSLR camera, and her game recordings from the XB1, so at most 1080p/60fps. She's saved up $300 towars buying a laptop, but If I can find some software and it'll handle the tasks, I'd rather just give her my old gaming rig, so she can worry about buying other stuff she may want. She'd have it hooked up to a 720p TV as a monitor

Will this work for a 15yr old? What is good, hopefully inexpensive software to do video editing on for beginners? Do I need any minor upgrades, or should I just let her blow her money on a laptop? It still runs games like Overwatch at at least 144fps on high/ultra, CoD Black Ops 4 at around 90-100fps.

DaVinci Resolve is free.  Very good movie editor.

 

You could also improve the pc a bit, with minimal money investment.

Depending on the motherboard (if you have 2 memory slots or 4, if you have 1 or 2 sticks now), you may be able to add an extra 8 GB of memory to have 16 GB in total which would help with snappiness and everything. That would cost you around 20-30$

You can probably open up the usb 500 gb drive and remove the drive from inside , most likely it's a regular sata3 drive with a tiny sata3 - usb adapter board. If you install it inside the pc with sata3 it will be a bit faster and work better.

You could probably upgrade the CPU as well to something like a 6 core or 8 core processor, which may help some games run better .. 

For example, you can buy an 8 core FX 8100 for around 55-60$, it will make games run better and will help with editing a bit as well:

~56$ https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-FX-4100-4200-4300-6100-6200-6300-8100-FX-8300-CPU-Processor/133215425516?hash=item1f044213ec%3Am%3Amn9xovff_l4PmO5VmV1NT8Q&LH_BIN=1

~60$ https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-FX-4100-4200-4300-6100-6200-6300-8100-FX-8300-CPU-Processor/133255743641?hash=item1f06a94899%3Am%3AmlCQZp-6cR7r5pJA6JN2GSA&LH_BIN=1

 

You could also buy a 1080p monitor for around 100$ ... even if she ends up buying a laptop, the monitor can always be used as a 2nd monitor for it, to get more screen real estate and work better.