Old Computer Upgrade

Bizoe308 · January 11, 2018

Hey guys/gals....

So i got a friend of mine that asked me for help upgrading his really old computer... I Didn't think it was gonna be that bad... but attached are the spec and boy I have my work cut out for me. This person has a max budget of maybe $2-300 USD total... They dont have much money. Anyways was looking for some help and if this even possible. After looking around i think just adding some more Ram and a video card should do the trick but which ones... yall feel me? TY

Unimaginative Name · January 11, 2018

Can we get pics of the inside? Is it a prebuilt with proprietary connectors? What does he want to do with the PC moving forward? Is it a case that takes a standard sized board?

If it's a standard ATX power supply and a case that can handle standard form factor boards, check out https://pcpartpicker.com/list/N3JC3C. The CPU performs better in all categories (even multicore) and there's money left to but something like GTX 770 used.

Bizoe308 · January 11, 2018

No it is not pre-built.

Unimaginative Name · January 11, 2018

2 minutes ago, Bizoe308 said:

No it is not pre-built.

If the power supply is sufficient, definitely look at a Skylake Pentium or a Ryzen 3. You can get the motherboards fairly cheap and if you live near a microcenter, you can get the motherboards $30 off as long as you buy the processor there as well. Get 8GB of DDR4. Then sell the old system (CPU, mobo, and RAM). Then use the rest of the budget for a used video card. The Core 2 Quad will bottleneck basically any modernish card.

Bizoe308 · January 12, 2018

So basically they need to upgrade this machine so they can properly use photoshop/illustrator... they wont be dong any real "designing" but they will be resizing photos and making quick edits and exporting files out so it just needs to run a little faster that it does now.