Basic PC build for Grandma

[WackyPlaysPS]

Budget: 200€

Country: Germany

Programs or workloads that it will be used for: Web browsing, checking emails, basic programms

Other details: Building a very basic PC for my Grandmother

Hello.

My Grandmas PC is very old and barely working anymore. I decided that I would build her a new PC for christmas. I´ve got a little bit of experience with building gaming PCs and know my way around electronics in general. The problem is, that I want to build her a PC so basic and inexpensive, that I have no idea what I should pay attention to when picking Parts.

The PC I want to build for her doesnt need anything fancy, very basic specs will do. Onboard graphics, obviously, and some functional case, no matter how ugly. RGB lights should be avoided completely, if possible.

Some more info on what the PC will be used for:

She is running a private little Holiday Home in a mountain area in Germany. So she needs a few basic programms for tracking guests etc. All of those programms are very basic and not at all demanding tho. Other than that, it´s basically just checking emails, web browsing and Data storage.

I was thinking some i3 (or maybe even a pentium) with integrated graphics, a basic motherboard (preferably with wifi suppport, only needs hdmi or vga video output), either the intel stock cooler or a very cheap additional cooler, some 300Watt power supply, maybe 2133 or 3000Mhz RAM (8Gb would be best I think), cheap and not super fast SSD or maybe even HDD (max 500Gb) and a purely functional case. She already has a monitor, speakers, a keyboard and a mouse.

The problem I have with putting together the parts list myself is that I have no idea what to look for with those rather inexpensive parts and its very hard for me to make an estimate on needed performance/specs due to lack of experience. Staying as far under the 200€ mark would be awesome.

 

And then there is another option. I could just try to upgrade her old PC to make it more usable. It has gottensuper slow over the years and my first thought was to upgrade the RAM and storage. Maybe even the processor. Problem with that is that the RAM is still DDR2 and therefore basically impossible to find new and better. It was a prebuilt machine back in the day, so theres also the problem of proprietary parts.

 

Any input is dearly welcome, thank you

[Jonathan Lee]

Hmm not sure you can actually do a full new build for 200. You might want to look at your local used market. This is about as cheap as I can reasonably get it without it being crap:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-10105 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Processor  (£121.54 @ Amazon UK) 
Motherboard: MSI MAG B460M BAZOOKA Micro ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (£69.98 @ Amazon UK) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 CL16 Memory  (£29.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Western Digital SN750 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£49.98 @ Amazon UK) 
Case: Corsair 275R Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case  (£54.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Power Supply: EVGA BQ 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply  (£44.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Total: £371.47
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-12-03 00:29 GMT+0000

 

I would recommend going 16GB if you're grandma likes to have a bunch of tabs open.

[WackyPlaysPS]

16 minutes ago, Jonathan Lee said:

Hmm not sure you can actually do a full new build for 200. You might want to look at your local used market. This is about as cheap as I can reasonably get it without it being crap:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-10105 3.7 GHz Quad-Core Processor  (£121.54 @ Amazon UK) 
Motherboard: MSI MAG B460M BAZOOKA Micro ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (£69.98 @ Amazon UK) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 CL16 Memory  (£29.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Western Digital SN750 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£49.98 @ Amazon UK) 
Case: Corsair 275R Airflow ATX Mid Tower Case  (£54.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Power Supply: EVGA BQ 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply  (£44.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Total: £371.47
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-12-03 00:29 GMT+0000

 

I would recommend going 16GB if you're grandma likes to have a bunch of tabs open.

Thank you for the fast and helpful response. I will look into those parts and maybe see if I can reuse some old parts or find some used ones online

 

[brob]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Pentium Gold G6405 4.1 GHz Dual-Core Processor  (€86.05 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte H510M H Micro ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (€76.39 @ Alza) 
Memory: G.Skill NT Series 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR4-2400 CL15 Memory  (€38.85 @ Computeruniverse) 
Storage: Patriot P300 512 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (€39.99 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Case: Aerocool CS-1102 ATX Mid Tower Case  (€31.98 @ Alternate) 
Power Supply: Xilence Performance A+ III 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  (€46.21 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Total: €319.47
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-12-03 02:34 CET+0100

[dilpickle]

You're better off with a pre built.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Just buy some old 3rd/4th gen prebuilt like an optiplex and add an extra stick of ddr3 for dual channel like an optiplex, running dual channel will give much better cpu and igpu performance