Building a new pc... advice needed

OfftheRails

OfftheRails

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So my dad's computer is on its last legs and I'm looking for a cheap upgrade path for him. It's an email/photoshop machine (he's a semi pro photographer) that takes minutes to get to desktop and makes a horrific rattling nose until it warms up.

He's running an ssd already and there's plenty of space. The case and opticals are perfectly serviceable. Screen and speakers are ok for now so it's a cpu/mobo/ram job.

He currently has a phenom 9850 in a no-name motherboard with 8gb. Looking for as much extra cpu power (I'm assuming - not being much other than a gamer myself) as possible without compromising my inheritance. Any ideas guys? Amd vs Intel, how much ram to go for and so on. Any point putting a video card in there?
 
The AMD A10 7850 would do the trick for a good price of about $150. If you want really low budget and duo-core which would be slower but cheaper, the Pentium G series has some nice options for about $50.

All in all, I'd say get an A10 cpu and a MB like the ASUS A55BM-E for about $60.00. You could add 8gb DDR3 up to 2133mhz on that and a video card like the AMD R7 250 for $90. Memory would be about $90 also so all in all you could get him a sweet setup for under or around $400.00
 
Unless his dad wants to do gaming, I don't think there is much point in getting a video card in addition to the APU - since it has a decent on board video unit.
 
You never know how much video or photo editing he might want to do though; if he's not into that I'd say skip the video card but if he does then it's a great one to have for that price. Either way, the A10, mb, DDR 3, all could be had for around $300 which is pretty sweet, especially considering his dad already has an SSD.

Question though: he'll need to reinstall everything on the SSD with a new cpu and MB so does he have the OS disk or does he need that too?
 
Good point Six. I'll check he's got it; otherwise I'll make sure we get it from the registry before we do anything drastic.

There's no chance of this machine being used for games. Ever. It's email, word processing, photoshop, photoshop, photoshop. Onboard graphics will be well up to the task unless they're monumentally shit...

A plan is starting to come together. He's already got 8GB installed; probably not very fast but the capacity's there. I'll look over mobo/cpu combos and see what he wants to do. Should be able to do this for about £100 if we shop around. Great stuff. Then we can benchmark the beast. I'll put one of my 8GB sticks in and benchmark again to see if faster RAM makes much of a difference.

Thankyou guys. I'll keep you posted.
 
Cheapest route for a build is an APU from AMD one of the A10's and a basic MOBO. Should be more than what he needs. So you're looking @ $200 if you shop around, maybe less. Not sure what kind of $$ you're looking to spend but you can always step up to an intel I3/I5.
 
Just be sure to go no less than 8GB ram. Editing can be a RAM hog. Prices have come down in recent years, especially if you deal hunt. Look at Bundles as well.
 
Definatly go with an AMD. It will be the cheaper option and work out a lot better for him in the end. There are alot of good combo deals for AMD with MSI and Gigabyte MOBOs and some even come with integrated graphics if you dont want to go with an AMD APU. If you go with the APU try to get a Gigabyte board for sure. They come with a secondary backup BIOS incase something gets fucked up. It has saved my ass more then once before.
 
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