I´m building a budget replacement since I lost my motherboard over electrical damage and could use some expert help

[Don Lobo]

Budget (including currency): 500 USD

Country: Costa Rica

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Current gen games, Photoshop and After Effects

Other details

Hello. My PC (Dell XPS 8700) recently suffered some electrical damage and I lost my motherboard (an Intel z87). Thankfully, it was only the motherboard that was damaged, but being an old Dell made model, currently discontinued, it’s fairly expensive to get a replacement for anything that wouldn’t be better spend on a new board. So I decided to upgrade.

 

Here’s what I got that still works:

 

·        - The XPS 8700 case, made for an mATX board as well as its original 460 watts PSU, both of which I’m hoping might work with the new components I’m buying

·         - A GTX 1050ti (with 2 fans, in case someone was wondering roughly how big it is) that I had on the previous system and thankfully still works

·         - CD/DVD unit from the XPS and the card reader, which I hope can connect to the new board as well

·         - A SATA 1TB hard drive used for storage

·         - Mini SATA 128GB SSD that I plan to format an use as boot drive and I’m hoping to get an M.2 adapter for

·         - Keyboard, mouse, 2.1 speakers and a 24 inch 1080p LCD monitor.

 

So essentially I would need to buy the motherboard, the CPU and the RAM, as well as an adapter for the SSD and a simple wifi/Bluetooth solution, since I will primarily use LAN. For this, I’ve set a budget of under 500 USD. I live in Costa Rica, but for the sake of the thread, is alright to use USD as point of reference.

 

The components I’ve been eyeing are the following:

·       

          - GIGABYTE A520M DS3H mATX:

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-a520m-ds3h/p/N82E16813145241?Description=gigabyte%20a520m%20ds3h&cm_re=gigabyte_a520m%20ds3h-_-13-145-241-_-Product&quicklink=true

·        

      - AMD RYZEN 5 3600 6-Core 3.6 GHz:

https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-5-3600/p/N82E16819113569?Description=Ryzen%203600&cm_re=Ryzen_3600-_-19-113-569-_-Product&quicklink=true

 

 - XPG GAMMIX D20 Desktop Memory: 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz:

https://www.newegg.com/xpg-16gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/0RN-00KG-000X5?Description=RAM%20XPG&cm_re=RAM_XPG-_-9SIAJNUDP67095-_-Product

 

This amounts to around 400 USD. In my country it’s a little more expensive, around 480 USD. I decided on an A520m and not a B550m as I don’t plan to overclock the CPU and it’s unlikely that I will ever need any additional heat shielding for the PSU for the kind of budget build I will be able to afford in the future. If I understand correctly, the Ryzen 5 3600 comes with a CPU fan of its own. I wasn’t planning on buying an additional one, but I don’t know if it might be a better idea to invest in one. Additionally, I decided on the 3600 as it roughly matches what I was using before, an i7 4790 (which I unfortunately won’t be able to use at all in spite of it being fine).

 

I will be using this system primarily for gaming and graphics design work, as well as the occasional video editing. I was already doing all of this with 12GBs of RAM at 1666 MHz, so I figured upgrading to 16GBs would be enough, and went for this specific A520m model, as it’s one of the few that I’ve found that has support for 4 sticks of RAM, which means I can safely buy another 2 8GBs later when I’m trying to upgrade.

 

Speaking of upgrading, I’m expecting to buy a Ryzen 5 or 7 from the 5000 series a few years down the road, hence why I went for a 500 AM4 board. I don’t expect any major upgrades in the GPU other than maybe a GTX 1660 Super in about a year, and probably something a bit stronger than that in a couple more years after, because of this I considered PCIe 4.0 support not necessary, but again, I don’t know if this might be a bad idea overall. Additionally, I will at most be using a single 1080p monitor, and don’t really have any intention of playing at anything over 60 fps.

 

I’ve never build my own PC as you folks can probably tell from the fact I had a Dell XPS 8700 before, so I would like to ask if there’s any inherent conflict between any of the parts I’ve mentioned?

 

I would also love to know, if anyone has tried it that is, if I might run into trouble trying to put the new board into the XPS 8700 case? It’s made for a mATX board, and I wasn’t able to find the exact size of the Intel z87 model as everywhere I look it only lists the size as “micro ATX”, but as far as the case goes, it isn’t too spacey but the original motherboard fit just fine, so that’s why I’m concerned.

 

I would also like some information on whether I should buy the M.2 adapter for my old mini SATA SSD, or if I should just buy a new M.2 SSD instead. I was more than happy with the speed that my old SSD had, so I don’t need it to be faster, buy I don’t know anything about these adapters, how to choose them or whether they affect the performance of the SSD, or even if they would produce some conflict when trying to use the attached SSD as a boot drive.

I’m also concerned about the wifi/Bluetooth solution. I primarily need the Bluetooth part to connect a controller or sometimes for headphones, so I want something simple but efficient. I’m not sure what type of adapter I should buy then.

 

Lastly, I would love to know if it’s legitimately worth it for me, building a budget PC, to invest on a slightly better motherboard for the sake of PCIe 4.0, overclocking or any other form of futureproofing you folks can think of. I don’t know that it is, but then again I don’t really know all that much about futureproofing a PC build. I’m hoping to keep upgrading it for at least 5 years to a similar budget level as time goes on, and maybe buy an entire new system when this one is at its limits in like 7 or so years. Based on all these information, would it be better to just expand the budget a bit for a B550m? And in that case, which one would be a good match for my build?

 

I think this is all the information you might need, but do let me know if there’s any other info I can give to help you help me, haha.

[emosun]

7 minutes ago, Don Lobo said:

Budget (including currency): 500 USD

you weren;t able to find the same board under 500? im seeing them for only about 60$

[Don Lobo]

36 minutes ago, emosun said:

you weren;t able to find the same board under 500?

Unfortunately, I was only able to find used z87 boards for around 90 to 175 USD. It will cost around 100% of that amount to get those parts from the US to Costa Rica. Meaning I would have to pay around 200 to 300 USD for a used board, that I can't upgrade as it is maxed out, as far as the CPU goes at least, and for which I have no idea what it was used for.

 

I was hoping to upgrade the entire thing next year and the power surge just sped the schedule up, so I'm aiming to spend 500 upgrading right now instead of 300 or so just making it work the same way it did, only to have to spend another 500 later down the line to upgrade it anyways.

[Bombastinator]

Dell can have problems interfacing with non Dell parts.  Do you have a working video card? That is the really hard one right now. It matters because it becomes a question of whether to look for a cpu with a gpu in it or not. As for the storage drive I would not buy an adaptor. It won’t make it any faster because it would still have to communicate through the drive’s sata interface.  I also wouldn’t buy a Nvme drive either unless it was cheaper than a sata drive as while nvme is lots faster, most stuff can’t generally actually capitalize usefully on that additional speed in a meaningful way.  Also your budget is low for a whole new build.  Save where possible, and one place is spending nothing extra on storage in less more space is needed.  It’s possible you have a really slow SSD.  They did exist, in which case more new fast storage may make sense.

 

“future-proofing” is mostly just about building a machine that can exceed the potential of a new console for gaming only.  It’s not really about anything else, and that kind of stuff only goes for as long as the new consoles are kept.  The assumption for that is 5-7 years, but there’s no guarantee.  Intel not making major improvements for a very long time allowed people to keep machines for longer than expected.  That seems to be over now though. A “future proof” PC is just one that is high enough specced it will last as long as the consoles.  Win11 may shorten even that.