Questions about updating to a less ancient machine

[Dramengo]

 

My current build is a 
AMD Phenom 9850 black edition running at stock 2.5 ghz

6 GB of gskill ram (DDR2 3x2 gb sticks)

hyper 212 led

ASUS M2N68-VM motherboard

MSI  n730-2gd3-r Graphics card

Corsair force SSD 120 gb

Western Digital HHD 300 gb

 

my budget is only $160 US before tax and shipping and that is a hard unsurpassable limit. I want to play games that came out in the last 8 years at 1080p 20 fps+. My current build is so slow now that I have issues with twitter, twitch, and youtube much less gaming. The current main bottleneck that I experience is both cpu speed and RAM speed/capacity.

 

Parts that I am looking at upgrading too:

AMD FX-8300 currently $78.98 @ outletpc

ASROCK N68C-GS4 FX $0.00 (downgraded from this so I can have more ram)

G.Skill F3-1600C11D-16GNT (DDR3 2x8 gb sticks) currently $79.99 newegg

 

So would this build work together? The motherboard supports am3+ that are 95 watts and lower and the fx-8300 is 95 watts, also ASROCKs QVL list doesn't list any modules over the capacity of 4gb even though they say that board supports up to 16 gb of ddr3 memory in its 2 ddr3 slots. I am open to other (better) options but given my strict budget I am grasping at straws here.

 

[Lord Nicoll]

8 minutes ago, Dramengo said:

 

My current build is a 
AMD Phenom 9850 black edition running at stock 2.5 ghz

6 GB of gskill ram (DDR2 3x2 gb sticks)

hyper 212 led

ASUS M2N68-VM motherboard

MSI  n730-2gd3-r Graphics card

Corsair force SSD 120 gb

Western Digital HHD 300 gb

 

my budget is only $160 US before tax and shipping and that is a hard unsurpassable limit. I want to play games that came out in the last 8 years at 1080p 20 fps+. My current build is so slow now that I have issues with twitter, twitch, and youtube much less gaming. The current main bottleneck that I experience is both cpu speed and RAM speed/capacity.

 

Parts that I am looking at upgrading too:

AMD FX-8300 currently $78.98 @ outletpc

ASROCK N68C-GS4 FX $0.00 (downgraded from this so I can have more ram)

G.Skill F3-1600C11D-16GNT (DDR3 2x8 gb sticks) currently $79.99 newegg

 

So would this build work together? The motherboard supports am3+ that are 95 watts and lower and the fx-8300 is 95 watts, also ASROCKs QVL list doesn't list any modules over the capacity of 4gb even though they say that board supports up to 16 gb of ddr3 memory in its 2 ddr3 slots. I am open to other (better) options but given my strict budget I am grasping at straws here.

 

Please don't buy FX, it's very old, hot and outdated, the Athlon 200GE, 8GB 2133Mhz RAM and a cheap AM4 board should be if not in budget, close enough, and offer  decent upgrade path to a quad core in the future and 16GB. 

[Lord Nicoll]

10 minutes ago, Dramengo said:

snip

I made this to see if it was possible and yeah, seems viable. Note it might require a BIOS update from a support CPU, but the 200GE has been out a while now so it should be fine. 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD - Athlon 200GE 3.2 GHz Dual-Core Processor	$54.90 @ OutletPC
Motherboard	ASRock - AB350M Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	$39.99 @ Newegg
Memory	ADATA - XPG GAMMIX D10 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 Memory	$58.99 @ Amazon
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$168.88
	Mail-in rebates	-$15.00
	Total	$153.88
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-11-18 09:24 EST-0500

 

[Dramengo]

 

I have found that windows and most media sites these days does not like 8gb of memory. I fill it up with one tab open trying to view a 720p 60fps stream on twitch(any browser) So I am leery of any ram less than 16 gb. Even then I wouldn't be able to purchase the list that you gave because it is outside of my absolute max budget. Granted it is only $8.88 more than it but the head of finances gave me a number to stick to and that outside of shipping and taxes I could not exceed what so ever. Thanks for the attempt though, I will keep an eye out to see if the prices drop any at all in the coming months in hopes that I can get up to that am4 platform.

[Lord Nicoll]

3 minutes ago, Dramengo said:

 

I have found that windows and most media sites these days does not like 8gb of memory. I fill it up with one tab open trying to view a 720p 60fps stream on twitch(any browser) So I am leery of any ram less than 16 gb. Even then I wouldn't be able to purchase the list that you gave because it is outside of my absolute max budget. Granted it is only $8.88 more than it but the head of finances gave me a number to stick to and that outside of shipping and taxes I could not exceed what so ever. Thanks for the attempt though.

I used a 7700K with 8GB of RAM fine for a lot things while i waited for a lovely and wonderful RMA process to go through, and can't say it was awful. With a GTX 980 the RAM restriction was only really notable in games. Most likely the bottleneck is bandwidth as well as running out. Also looking at that board, there seem to be two versions, one with 4 DIMMs and one weird looking board with 2 DIMM slots on the top. 

[Dramengo]

The version I have has two ddr3 and two ddr2 slots and supports am2-am3+ cpus, And as far as the 8gb ram goes I used to have 8gb of ram but one stick died, and as you said some/most of my ram issues could have been due to bandwidth, I will give that list to the head of finances as a preferred to check on for any price drops.