Simple PC for Parents

[Inversion]

Hey everyone, I have a sort of simple build I'm planning on to replace the ageing Dell Optiplex PC my parents have been using for the last 4 or 5 years. It's really showing it's age and they've asked me to look into parting out a new one. They've said they're happy to buy my old parts off me since I'd be selling them anyway so my thoughts are below. This rig is for web browsing, Microsoft office and printing stuff so no gaming beyond maybe the occasional facebook game.

 

EDIT: The HDD is included to act as storage for a large collection of Photos, Music and Documents with possibility to start ripping a DVD collection.

 

Build:

CPU - AMD A6-6400K APU (Mine) - £30

MOBO - ASUS A88XM-A FM2+ MOBO (Mine) - £40

Cooler - Cooler Master Hyper 103 (Mine) - £15

RAM - HyperX Fury Blue DDR3 1x8GB (Mine) - £30

SSD - Western Digital Green 120GB - £30

HDD - WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM - £35

Case - CiT Xecutioner (Mine w/ broken USB 3.0) - £15

PSU - Some random 500W unit from Maplin. - £0

Disk Drive - Lite-On DVD Drive - £10

OS - Windows 10 Home 64-bit - £80

 

Total - £285

 

Anything you'd say isn't worth it? Anything worth getting changed? Are my prices for my parts reasonable given how much it would be new and that most of it was used for less than 2 years.

[79wjd]

What is the current system and have you tried putting an SSD in it?

 

Also, it doesn't sound like they need an HDD.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

i think SSD will probably be a priority because they will likely to enjoy the responsiveness of a system as opposed to a faster cpu, so maybe ditch the HDD.

[Inversion]

7 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

What is the current system and have you tried putting an SSD in it?

 

Also, it doesn't sound like they need an HDD.

 

7 hours ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

i think SSD will probably be a priority because they will likely to enjoy the responsiveness of a system as opposed to a faster cpu, so maybe ditch the HDD.

Their current system is an old Core2Duo or Pentium 4, not sure which. It's only got 4 GB of RAM and I'm pretty sure that it only supports up to SATA 2 which wouldn't be as good for the SSD, The current case is a small form factor Dell case and there's not much room and as far as the Hard Drive is concerned, I should have said they also have an ungodly amount of photos and music. Currently their stuff is stored on a single external HDD but they've agreed to move it to an internal drive and use the external as a backup. I'll add it to the post. Other than that okay?

[Ordinarily_Greater]

47 minutes ago, Inversion said:

Their current system is an old Core2Duo or Pentium 4, not sure which. It's only got 4 GB of RAM and I'm pretty sure that it only supports up to SATA 2 which wouldn't be as good for the SSD, The current case is a small form factor Dell case and there's not much room and as far as the Hard Drive is concerned, I should have said they also have an ungodly amount of photos and music. Currently their stuff is stored on a single external HDD but they've agreed to move it to an internal drive and use the external as a backup. I'll add it to the post. Other than that okay?

Ok so get the 1TB HDD for that ungodly amount of stuffs and the New upgrade will bring them SATA 3 which is up to 6GBPS and will minimalize the bottleneck of a modern SSD

[Inversion]

26 minutes ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

Ok so get the 1TB HDD for that ungodly amount of stuffs and the New upgrade will bring them SATA 3 which is up to 6GBPS and will minimalize the bottleneck of a modern SSD

That was exactly my thinking. Turns out they may have a 1TB SATA 3 drive in their current system (it was a refurb) so I might be able to salvage that. Tbh I'm just glad a I don't need to buy a GPU or new RAM cause even DDR3 prices are jacked up to hell.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

5 minutes ago, Inversion said:

That was exactly my thinking. Turns out they may have a 1TB SATA 3 drive in their current system (it was a refurb) so I might be able to salvage that. Tbh I'm just glad a I don't need to buy a GPU or new RAM cause even DDR3 prices are jacked up to hell.

yea, GPU and RAM are the two most overpriced parts in this crypto currency and DRAM shortage storm. what a pleasure to not spend money on overpriced parts

[Inversion]

1 hour ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

yea, GPU and RAM are the two most overpriced parts in this crypto currency and DRAM shortage storm. what a pleasure to not spend money on overpriced parts

It really is a joy. I just hope I didn't kill anything when I took apart my PC. Might have to buy some new thermal paste but that's no big deal. Turns out they only had 2GB of DDR2 so the step up to 8GB DDR3, the faster CPU and the SSD should make it a much better experience for what they do on their PC. And since the most intensive task will be google chrome, I'm not that worried about using an off brand PSU. The system will never be on full load

[Ordinarily_Greater]

23 minutes ago, Inversion said:

It really is a joy. I just hope I didn't kill anything when I took apart my PC. Might have to buy some new thermal paste but that's no big deal. Turns out they only had 2GB of DDR2 so the step up to 8GB DDR3, the faster CPU and the SSD should make it a much better experience for what they do on their PC. And since the most intensive task will be google chrome, I'm not that worried about using an off brand PSU. The system will never be on full load

yea it would never be full load, also you can sell the old system for like the price of the new hard drive that you listed so you actually don't spend much money.

 

And yes obviously the PSU will be fine because the system isn't overclocked.

 

It will be an improved experience over their old system, also maybe for thermal paste maybe re-use from your existing thermal paste if you still have?

 

The important thing is that you don't short out the components so it will work just fine

[Inversion]

28 minutes ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

yea it would never be full load, also you can sell the old system for like the price of the new hard drive that you listed so you actually don't spend much money.

 

And yes obviously the PSU will be fine because the system isn't overclocked.

 

It will be an improved experience over their old system, also maybe for thermal paste maybe re-use from your existing thermal paste if you still have?

 

The important thing is that you don't short out the components so it will work just fine

Yeah I'm out of thermal paste but I'm gonna need to get more anyway cause I wanna do a good clean out of my own PC anyway and I wanna blow out the heatsink. I might see if I can sell the Core2 Duo system as well. Might get at least some money for it.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

19 hours ago, Inversion said:

Yeah I'm out of thermal paste but I'm gonna need to get more anyway cause I wanna do a good clean out of my own PC anyway and I wanna blow out the heatsink. I might see if I can sell the Core2 Duo system as well. Might get at least some money for it.

yea do a good clean and give the system as an upgrade to your parents

[rukspuks]

Get a G4560 and a $30 motherboard. Sell those junk AMD cpus if you can. Rest of the build is OK.

[Inversion]

3 hours ago, rukspuks said:

Get a G4560 and a $30 motherboard. Sell those junk AMD cpus if you can. Rest of the build is OK.

Buying a G4560 is a lot more expensive and it's not like they need a lot out of the PC. To get that CPU, I'd need to get a new Motherboard AND new RAM since the G4560 runs using DDR4 not the DDR3 I have already. This CPU is more than enough for their needs. I gamed on it for 8 months with it as my primary machine and although it wasn't the best a gaming, it was fine for everything they'll be using it for. It's by far superior to what they have right now and I won't be spending £45 on a new CPU I don't need, or money on a motherboard for it, not to mention £70 on 8 GB of DDR4 when I have a perfectly functional and respectable platform already. 

 

No offence but it's fanboys like you that flat out ignore the use case and discard a build based on what brand of CPU is going in it that make planning a build that much worse. if I didn't know that the parts I have now are perfectly viable for their use case I might have asked them to spend a lot more than they need to. This is clearly a value orientated build and my parents don't wanna spend too much.

[rukspuks]

1 hour ago, Inversion said:

Buying a G4560 is a lot more expensive and it's not like they need a lot out of the PC. To get that CPU, I'd need to get a new Motherboard AND new RAM since the G4560 runs using DDR4 not the DDR3 I have already. This CPU is more than enough for their needs. I gamed on it for 8 months with it as my primary machine and although it wasn't the best a gaming, it was fine for everything they'll be using it for. It's by far superior to what they have right now and I won't be spending £45 on a new CPU I don't need, or money on a motherboard for it, not to mention £70 on 8 GB of DDR4 when I have a perfectly functional and respectable platform already. 

 

No offence but it's fanboys like you that flat out ignore the use case and discard a build based on what brand of CPU is going in it that make planning a build that much worse. if I didn't know that the parts I have now are perfectly viable for their use case I might have asked them to spend a lot more than they need to. This is clearly a value orientated build and my parents don't wanna spend too much.

3

You can get a G4560 for $40ish on ebay or G4400 for $35. Both G4400 and G4560 support DDR3. Your CPU is too old and performs really badly according to userbenchmark. I was just suggesting what looked better to me. If you do not like my advice, sure that's your prerogative but that's my opinion. In future, you could upgrade the H110 to an i5 or i7 and you don't have to upgrade anything. That shitty AMD junk of a CPU won't be any good in nearby time.

 

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-G4400-vs-AMD-A6-6400K-APU/

[Inversion]

3 minutes ago, rukspuks said:

You can get a G4560 for $40ish on ebay or G4400 for $35. Both G4400 and G4560 support DDR3. Your CPU is too old and performs really badly according to userbenchmark. I was just suggesting what looked better to me. If you do not like my advice, sure that's your prerogative but that's my opinion. In future, you could upgrade the H110 to an i5 or i7 and you don't have to upgrade anything. That shitty AMD junk of a CPU won't be any good in nearby time.

Given that also according to User Benchmarks, the A6 is about twice as good as the Core2 Duo they have and I already have the A6 and know it works and I'm not having to take a chance with ebay sellers. I'll stick with that. I am not saying that the Pentium is bad, I know it's a good chip, I just don't need to spend the extra but thanks for the insight. 

 

But for the record, dismissing AMD as junk is kinda short sighted, AMD CPUs have always been a good value option and considering I have them already and for what I'm doing they will perform well, I'll carry on using them.

[rukspuks]

1 minute ago, Inversion said:

But for the record, dismissing AMD as junk is kinda short sighted, AMD CPUs have always been a good value option and considering I have them already and for what I'm doing they will perform well, I'll carry on using them.

1

I liked AMD athlon way back in 2005-06 after that till ryzen they were no match to the Intel ones. They had higher power consumption and low performance.

[Inversion]

Just now, rukspuks said:

I liked AMD athlon way back in 2005-06 after that till ryzen they were no match to the Intel ones. They had higher power consumption and low performance.

But much lower price (especially when you factor in the platform) which made them great value for people on a tighter budget such as myself. I didn't have the money for a GPU originally so an APU was a good stopgap measure and it's just been lying around for over a year since I got an Athlon X4 860K and a 960