Desktop for my Mother

[Thales of Miletus]

Budget (including currency): < 400 USD

Country: United States of America

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Video editing, browsing, light content creation.

Other details: My mother is looking to upgrade from her Dell Precision M4600 mobile workstation with 8GB RAM and a Quadro 1000M GPU to something that can handle modern GPU-reliant video editing. She'd like to use Kdenlive; the min. sys. reqs. are a 4+ core CPU, an OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU, and we're hoping for at least 16 GB of RAM. She wants a desktop this time around; any form factor besides something enormous will fit. We want to buy used (lower cost & reduces e-waste!) I'm looking around for options, but if anyone knows of a reliable seller or something in this price range, I'd be happy for the advice! The last computer I bought was a little Dell Latitude, so I'm not exactly an expert.

 

Also, having Winbugs Windows installed is optional. We're a Linux-powered family!

 

Thank you for your time reading this!

 

Edited January 6, 2023 by Thales of Miletus
Fix spacing.

[LloydLynx]

Get a Dell Optiplex and slap in a new Radeon graphics card. Get a card that's powered by the PCIe slot, or upgrade the power supply so you can put a bigger graphics card in.(Watch out for the 8 pin motherboard power, there are adapters available) Make sure it has an SSD instead of an HDD. In my personal experience, and the experience of many others, Optiplexes have great Linux compatibility. I would advise an Optiplex with 4th gen Intel (Haswell), as that's what I have and it works great. Though feel free to go with other generations as Linux support is great across the board. 

[Thales of Miletus]

4 minutes ago, LloydLynx said:

Get a Dell Optiplex and slap in a new Radeon graphics card. Get a card that's powered by the PCIe slot, or upgrade the power supply so you can put a bigger graphics card in.(Watch out for the 8 pin motherboard power, there are adapters available) Make sure it has an SSD instead of an HDD. In my personal experience, and the experience of many others, Optiplexes have great Linux compatibility. I would advise an Optiplex with 4th gen Intel (Haswell), as that's what I have and it works great. Though feel free to go with other generations as Linux support is great across the board. 

Hmm... I think when I was scrolling eBay I had the filters set to drop anything lower than 7th gen. (IDK why.) But if 4th gen is still fine, I'll look for that... Like I said, I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to hardware. Thank you for that!

[Thales of Miletus]

Ahh, yes. Changing that CPU filter has much nicer results cropping up! I'll mark this resolved once she picks one that suits her! Thank you, @LloydLynx!

[LloydLynx]

2 minutes ago, bent keycaps said:

You can simply place the laptop motherboard into a desktop case, drill a hole into the side for the display, then pull the cables until they fit as shown in the image. If you run into any thermal/electrical problems, you can replace the power supply and install copper tape to connect the components. Hope this helps!

That's hobby project territory, not workstation territory. I doubt OP's mom would be happy with that kind of solution unless the project was expertly made and super well polished. That would be a lot of time and effort and probably money for supplies and parts. 

[matt0725]

11 minutes ago, LloydLynx said:

That's hobby project territory, not workstation territory. I doubt OP's mom would be happy with that kind of solution unless the project was expertly made and super well polished. That would be a lot of time and effort and probably money for supplies and parts. 

bent is using discount chatgpt or something. every post hes made is some sort of nonsense. ive reported to mods on another thread already.

[Thales of Miletus]

26 minutes ago, LloydLynx said:

That's hobby project territory, not workstation territory. I doubt OP's mom would be happy with that kind of solution unless the project was expertly made and super well polished. That would be a lot of time and effort and probably money for supplies and parts. 

I would be fired as head of household IT. Or worse...