Budget PC CPU Replacement Options

[Zade_95]

Hi all,

 

So last year I built my friend a super budget gaming PC for his birthday as he's at university and only had a laptop for gaming.

 

We managed to make a Q6600 PC with 8GB of DDR2, an SSD, HDD, and a R9 270x. It's been going well but either the CPU is dying or it just can't handle it, expecially in games like GTA V (what we would play mainly) where discord will drop it and the game itself is nearly unplayable with framerate drops in cpu intensive times and textures that don't load etc.

 

So we're thinking of replacing it, but i'm wondering what the best idea will be.

 

We have the choice of:

 

Replacing the Q6600 with a Q9550 or Xeon E5462 for about $30-$50 NZD, or just replacing the CPU, board, and RAM with something like a G4560, a stick of DDR4, and the cheapest LGA1151 board we can find for maybe $300 NZD.

 

Anyone got any thoughts or ideas on this?

 

Thanks!

[TheCherryKing]

4 minutes ago, Lukozade said:

Hi all,

 

So last year I built my friend a super budget gaming PC for his birthday as he's at university and only had a laptop for gaming.

 

We managed to make a Q6600 PC with 8GB of DDR2, an SSD, HDD, and a R9 270x. It's been going well but either the CPU is dying or it just can't handle it, expecially in games like GTA V (what we would play mainly) where discord will drop it and the game itself is nearly unplayable with framerate drops in cpu intensive times and textures that don't load etc.

 

So we're thinking of replacing it, but i'm wondering what the best idea will be.

 

We have the choice of:

 

Replacing the Q6600 with a Q9550 or Xeon E5462 for about $30-$50 NZD, or just replacing the CPU, board, and RAM with something like a G4560, a stick of DDR4, and the cheapest LGA1151 board we can find for maybe $300 NZD.

 

Anyone got any thoughts or ideas on this?

 

Thanks!

The new Pentiums and Celerons generally perform worse than Xeons from many years ago.  I recommend you replace the Q6600 with a Xeon.

[tlink]

get the highest clocked chip that you can run and cool. not sure if it would be worth it though. g4560 is a pretty solid choice, but for those expenses it might be worth it to save up and upgrade to ryzen r3 in a couple of months that will give him 4 physical cores. the prices for cheap motherboards for ryzen and intel are pretty much the same if you pick 2xx chipset from intel, except if you really need atx then ryzen is cheaper(you would have to update the bios very likely on intel 1xx boards so that might be out of the question anyways). the cheapest ryzen has an msrp of 129 us dollars i think so thats slightly less than the cost of two g4560 processors.

[Eternia]

I suggest checking out the ryzen 5 lineup.They're great for budget solutions.Also check out Kaby Lake i3s and pentiums.