LGA1150 socket MOBO - should I upgrade CPU?

keik · June 1, 2023

Story: it's a passed down pc no one wants.

Parts: mobo MSI H81M-P33, 4GB RAM, stock cooling and Intel Pentium G3250 CPU.
Should I bother getting any better CPU and more RAM?

This will not be anything big - maybe NAS, home server or home security at best. This will not be a main work PC. I just want to save a perfectly fine and working computer from being tossed into landfill or add cheap parts and flip it.

Thanks!

Radium_Angel · June 1, 2023

A NAS doesn't need much CPU power, another 4GB RAM might be useful, but don't put any more money into this than that...

Blender016 · June 1, 2023

I still use my Haswell CPU in a Z97 motherboard and from the second hand market and current retail pricing for new parts it's obvious getting a new CPU for this platform is a bad idea. Buying last gen R7 or i7 with 16 GB of RAM is about 500$ and the top Haswell CPU is almost 100$ here. Your region's pricing may vary and you should look at that first, both new and used, but the performance gains are huge if you buy new and the pricing is not bad compared to the new GPU market. In my opinion you should save up and buy new, and use the old combo as a NAS or server host for games, with 8 GB of RAM recommended. That is what I will do with my PC when I have time to play some new games.

YoungBlade · June 2, 2023

If it's just being used for a NAS, the Pentium G3250 is probably fine. If you do find that it's holding you back, you can always upgrade later to an old i5 4440 to double your core count for about $10 used on eBay.

RAM may be a useful upgrade depending on how you configure the NAS. If you intend to use RAM caching to improve HDD performance, then getting more RAM could be beneficial. At the same time, RAM caching can require a non-trivial amount of CPU performance to manage. So, if you do go that route, you may find that you need both a CPU and RAM upgrade to accommodate it, but I don't think I'd recommend it here.

If you're using the 1 Gbps Ethernet port that the board comes with, then RAM caching would probably be a waste. Hard drives are slow, sure, but the max throughput you'll get will be only around 100MB/s - typically a bit lower - so you're going to be bottlenecked by your networking before you're bottlenecked by the HDDs most of the time anyway.