Upgrade path for my brothers prebuilt

[MoVo]

Budget (including currency): 250-300€

Country: Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

• Python programming & light to medium simulations (CPU bound)
• Occasional gaming (CSGO, Minecraft)

 

My younger brother is in desperate need of an upgrade. He's in his third semester of his math bachelor and is now facing some CS/Software engineering modules where he's supposed to build out small to medium projects primarily in python. His current PC is ~5 years old and was a prebuilt back then with the following components

• MSI GTX 1050 TI
• Some unbranded mico-ATX Board
• A 350W no-name PSU
• Intel 7000 series i5
• 8GB of RAM
• 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD

He needs to by a new laptop as well (my hand me down is also not the greatest anymore) and wanted to by one of those Gaming machines. I recommended him to invest the markup into upgrading his desktops PC instead since they are usually way better value. Since he doesn't need a whole lot of mobile computing power, he wanted to go down that route. Being a student, he's on a fairly tight budget and the components should not dramatically exceed 250€

 

I'm currently considering the following replacement parts

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600G for CPU

• GIGABYTE B450M K

• Kingston FURY Beast DIMM Kit 16GB (currently has a slow 8GB DDR4)

• Western Digital WD Blue SN570 NVMe SSD 1TB (will keep the current SATA SSD to dual boot Linux)

 

With current prices, all of the components listed above would be around 280€ which would be in acceptable range. Should I re-consider anything before actually ordering? 

 

[Zando_]

The 1050 Ti is a faster GPU than the one onboard AMD APUs, so if a non-G, regular 6c chip is available cheaper then go with that. Otherwise looks about the best you can do. I would check the price on the Team Group MP34 1TB in your market as well, if it's cheaper than that WD then it should be a better option. My 1TB one cost me about $50 USD even (the WD looks to be $52 on US market). 

[MoVo]

3 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

so if a non-G, regular 6c chip is available cheaper then go with that.

Funnily enough the non-G chip is 25€ more expensive than the G version. Is there any downside by going with the G version? 

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, MoVo said:

Funnily enough the non-G chip is 25€ more expensive than the G version. Is there any downside by going with the G version? 

It's PCIe 3.0 only, no 4.0. So are the 5500 and 4500 which are usually priced similarly. Only 5600 (non-G) and higher are actually 4.0 capable chips. Other than the PCIe revision, no downside that I know of. I guess the fact that the iGPU will reserve some RAM for itself? Usually an entire 2GB (meaning only 14GB usable by the OS), but you should be able to change that in BIOS if the OEM did their due diligence and enabled that option in the BIOS, I believe some don't. You'd have to google and see if anyone has tested with that specific motherboard. 

[SorryBella]

1 hour ago, MoVo said:

• MSI GTX 1050 TI
• Some unbranded mico-ATX Board
• A 350W no-name PSU
• Intel 7000 series i5
• 8GB of RAM
• 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD

With how you phrased it, this sounds like a built boutique computer made from off the shelves parts rather than a proprietary big box PC. Is this true or am i misunderstood?

[MoVo]

7 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

With how you phrased it, this sounds like a built boutique computer made from off the shelves parts rather than a proprietary big box PC. Is this true or am i misunderstood?

Its a prebuilt, but its not be the big vendors of the likes of Dell, HP, etc. As far as I am able to tell, there are no non-standard parts in the build. The only part that do not appear to be regularly purchasable off-the shelf parts is the mainboard and the RAM. 

[SorryBella]

Just now, MoVo said:

Its a prebuilt, but its not be the big vendors of the likes of Dell, HP, etc. As far as I am able to tell, there are no non-standard parts in the build. The only part that do not appear to be regularly purchasable off-the shelf parts is the mainboard and the RAM. 

I want you to make sure that thats the case, see if it has 24 pin on the motherboard's power connector. But besides that, if youre willing to go on ebay id just go simple with it:

1.  i7 7700 - 80-90 euro used
2. 2x8 G.Skill Aegis 3200C16 DDR4 RAM - 37 euro new
3. Corsair CV550 - 60 euro new
4. GTX 1660, RX 5700XT, RX 6600XT, GTX 1080Ti - 100-120 euro used, cross shop all of them.

[MoVo]

Hey all, thanks for your suggestions. Its been a while, but I just wanted to share the path we've decided to go now.

As I stated in the intro post, as a student, my brother is on a fairly tight budget. As it turns out, with his new schedule he'll definitely have to invest quite a bit into a new notebook which is priority #1. I still wanted him to have his desktop system at home which he still uses for occasional gaming (mostly CSGO and RocketLeague). 

 

Inspired by one of the recent LTT videos, we've decided to go with a clean install and to give AtlasOS a try. We'll also clean out his wayyy too dusty case and add new thermal paste in hopes to get temps back under control. He also said he wanted to give Linux a try which I definitely approve of, but that'll be in a dual boot way. To improve the overall experience a little bit I'll probably gift him a RAM upgrade and a bigger SSD as well, so he can dedicate his budget entirely to his new university machine. 

 

Although I did not end up choosing one of the suggested paths, thank you all for your ideas!