Lets revive a dinosaur!

[Hotspur93]

Hey all! So this is my first post here on these forums as well as my first build! I've been an avid gamer all my life but most of my gaming has been done on consoles or prebuilt machines. Well its time to change that! I want to do my own build however I'm not making it easy on myself. A lot of you may disagree with me, but I love the case on my old Gateway FX 6800-01e. 

 

 

Its got the patina and sentimental value of hours and days of gaming for me everything from WoW to BF2. I've done what I can to keep the old girl running as just a home computer for checking emails watching videos and what not as her days of playing games seem to have ended. What I want to do is replace the internals but keep the case, I have no idea how difficult this will be which is why I'm here for some advice from the interwebs. 

 

Here is what her inards look like now:

 

 

I know the cable management is awful, but I needed a new power supply and this one was on sale! Also the original AMD card burned out and I replaced it with a Geforce GTX 730, not a great card but gets the job done.

Unfortunately the old girl has started to fail.....

 

 

I've looked at as many solutions to this as possible on the web, I've done everything short of reinstalling the OS cause I cant find my OS disk. I did have windows 7 which was really nice rather than the original Windows Vista. 

 

ANYWAY.... here are the parts that I was looking into buying, I omitted an OS for right now although I'll probably have to get one : / 

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/mqDVJV

 

My planned uses for this computer are to be gaming and some streaming. The games I enjoy playing are everything from Minecraft to PUBG and Space Engineers. I would like to have a dual monitor set up at 1080p quality if possible. 

 

Please let me know what you guys think! If at all possible I would like to get my budget down to $500 from the current $750. Also fair warning I'm not super tech savy but I do have a running knowledge and I am a quick study!

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Well, life finds a way.

 

I would go for a Coffee Lake i3, it's basically the same as a Kaby Lake i5 but newer architecture and slightly higher stock and turbo speeds.

[Vandorlot]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rJLT8K

[Hotspur93]

@Vandorlot I'm worried that the motherboard on your list wont fit in my case. Like I said I'm not super tech savy so im not sure the difference between a micro ATX and ATX motherboard. : /

[AresKrieger]

Well you could install windows 10 for free if you wanted, it would simply not allow for some customization and would have a water mark in the bottom right, perfectly legal limited of course but would allow you to use the system without paying for the OS initially, and I believe AMD still supports windows 7 so you could go that route more easily if you went ryzen though it should be noted intel is better for gaming atm

[Hotspur93]

Well I'm going to keep researching and see if there is any way to save the Windows 7 OS I currently have, I'm concerned that the bootmgr error im running into is software related and not hardware related. If it is I believe it will be rather difficult to save the OS. Shoot even if I can save it I'm not even sure I can move it from the old HDD to the SSD I want to get.

[Vandorlot]

7 minutes ago, Hotspur93 said:

@Vandorlot I'm worried that the motherboard on your list wont fit in my case. Like I said I'm not super tech savy so im not sure the difference between a micro ATX and ATX motherboard. : /

The board you have rn looks like its micro atx. Also send the case name.

[seon123]

Not quite $500. It doesn't have much of an upgrade path for the CPU.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 3 1200 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($59.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory  ($74.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SK hynix - SL308 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($78.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: XFX - Radeon RX 580 4GB GTS XXX Edition Video Card  ($259.00 @ Amazon) 
Total: $572.86
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-18 18:36 EST-0500

[Bananasplit_00]

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/wC3DBP
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/wC3DBP/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel - Core i5-8400 2.8GHz 6-Core Processor  ($199.89 @ B&H) 
CPU Cooler: Deepcool - GAMMAXX 400 74.3 CFM CPU Cooler  ($18.38 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock - Z370M Pro4 Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($126.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory  ($74.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SanDisk - SSD PLUS 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($79.00 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GAMING Video Card  ($259.89 @ OutletPC) 
Total: $759.14
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-18 18:49 EST-0500

 

id probably get this instead, better CPU and cooler, same level of GPU. had to compromise on the RAM and the storage a little bit however but this will win in any game

[Vandorlot]

39 minutes ago, seon123 said:

Not quite $500. It doesn't have much of an upgrade path for the CPU.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 3 1200 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($59.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory  ($74.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SK hynix - SL308 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($78.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: XFX - Radeon RX 580 4GB GTS XXX Edition Video Card  ($259.00 @ Amazon) 
Total: $572.86
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-18 18:36 EST-0500

Amd says they will support am4 for a couple years so the is an upgrade path.

[seon123]

2 minutes ago, Vandorlot said:

Amd says they will support am4 for a couple years so the is an upgrade path.

That's not the issue. The issue is the VRM on the motherboard; it can't really handle much more than a quad core. Next gen Zen might have improved efficiency, which might allow for some decent upgrades. 

[Vandorlot]

3 minutes ago, seon123 said:

That's not the issue. The issue is the VRM on the motherboard; it can't really handle much more than a quad core. Next gen Zen might have improved efficiency, which might allow for some decent upgrades. 

Guess we will find out next year. Also, Intel doesnt support an upgrade pat either in their most recent cpus so you wouldnt be able to make a good upgrade path anyway. 

[seon123]

Just now, Vandorlot said:

Guess we will find out next year. Also, Intel doesnt support an upgrade pat either in their most recent cpus so you wouldnt be able to make a good upgrade path anyway. 

A decent AM4 motherboard would have an upgrade path to the 6 and 8-cores. But the TUF costs quite a bit more than the one I picked

[Vandorlot]

1 minute ago, seon123 said:

A decent AM4 motherboard would have an upgrade path to the 6 and 8-cores. But the TUF costs quite a bit more than the one I picked

But that motherboard does have support for ryzen 5 and 7...

[seon123]

11 minutes ago, Vandorlot said:

But that motherboard does have support for ryzen 5 and 7...

But OP wanted to reduce cost. 

[Hotspur93]

I do appreciate the effort to reduce costs and I'm glad to see everyone pitching their ideas! I do see the benefits of going thru AMD as they are a little more budget friendly. And the price I listed of $500 isn't a set number. Its more of a what can I do with that budget and hopefully get a decent set up that will last until more funds are available. The other things I'm seeing that are closer to the $750 mark are probably the most I would spend on this particular build with this case and goals. Also because that's probably the most money I could get together without having to eat ramen noodles for the next 6 months . Obviously there are a million ways this can be done and I'm excited to see where this goes!

 

Now I do have some questions for the community, 1st being the difference between ATX and micro ATX. My understanding is that largely its only a size difference, the difference also allowing for a large variety of options in terms of CPU's,  RAM slots, etc. I know that this is probably a vary basic comparison so I'm hoping to get a better understanding. One thing I have been trying to consider is if the case will accept different mobo forms, sadly I'm a noob and not sure how to tell.   

 

[Hotspur93]

2 hours ago, Vandorlot said:

The board you have rn looks like its micro atx. Also send the case name.

The case is actually whatever came out of the box with the Gateway FX-6800-01e. Im not sure it has a particular name but I can possibly find an old part number....maybe?

[Hotspur93]

Here are some additional photos of the case I want to use, I may have to make some modifications though. Lets here what you guys think! 

 

[Vandorlot]

Thats not atx.Thats either micro-atx or some custom made mobo that isnt with the atx-stadard meaning youd need a new case. If anything you could find a case for 20 dollars.

[Hotspur93]

What would be the best way to confirm if it's microATX or some other custom mobo?

[Hotspur93]

So it looks like the OS is toast. The drive that it is on is super dead, anytime I attempt to use that drive it gets to be a billion degrees hot before I've even gotten to the point to pick my user. So looks like I'm gonna have to but that OS after all, unless someone here knows how to recover the info from the drive and get it onto another drive?