I built PC’s and was an IT technician (more hardware based, no programming) and as much as I love AMD, for pure compute and IPC the newer Intels are hard to beat. For price/value the Ryzen 8 cores are very good and compete with all but the highest end I tell chips, but then you’re getting into cups that cost as much as your PC budget. I recommend hopping on Craigslist and looking for a used gaming PC someone built for $1200 but is selling for half because they got out of gaming or upgraded. Your current system is actually not bad, but upgrading is extremely limited due to the USSF.
You should be fine with:
8th gen Core i5 or i7 or Ryzen 5 or 7
8 gb ddr4
A midrange GPU
As zoulas said your current pc must have cost you way more than $600 when you got it. If you don’t mind assembling the PC yourself you can get some ideas by looking at the complete builds on pcpartpicker where the price ranges is around $600.
Wait if you can. Hardware prices currently are very bad you won’t be able to find a decent graphics card cheap enough. Right now any graphics card will break your budget, A decent graphics card will push up the price a bit, a few hundred dollars.
If you can keep your current graphics card for a bit longer and keep your hard drives/SSDs get a setup like this.
The thing is a rip off, single channel 8 gig stick the PSU is good 80+ gold certified but very limited upgrade path due to limitations on the motherboard.
The board has a really odd mounting pattern and cooler for a Ryzen chipset since the mounting pattern on the board is designed for an LGA 1155 chipset, the CPU has a 65w TDP while HP actually put on a LGA1155 cooler which is rated for 40w TDP processors so the thing doesn’t have the ability to adequately cool the CPU properly which will cause thermal throttling at best.
I picked mine up used about 3-4 years ago and added the SSDs and ram upgrade. IIRC it cost me around $675 with the upgrades.
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I would maybe consider building from scratch, but I never have so I’m not sure that is the way to go. I was hoping with as long as it had been since I purchased a PC I could get something used that was a descent leap forward, but so far I’ve not found anything to justify spending the extra money.
Building a PC these days is really straightforward and can easily be done by almost anyone. And using something like pcpartpicker you’re pretty much assured that all the components go together. Once you have all the parts it probably wouldn’t take you more than 2 to 4 hours to put them together, and that’s with taking time off to eat lunch, surf BLF, etc
Building a PC is pretty easy. If you can build flashlight drivers and do custom work on lights, you could do it. You wouldn’t need an upgraded cooler or fancy graphics card, just something for basic computing. I’d put my money towards a capable cpu, 16 gb ram kit, and a decent motherboard with a good power supply. You’d need an operating system, but you can get an image of windows 10 and a $6 key from Ebay and you’re set there.
Definitely go AMD if you ever plan on running Linux. I would go with more memory and run apps from tmpfs. Windows apps in a virtualized environment run blazingly fast. No way would I go with Intel after the last few years of repeated CVEs against the processor.
As a former overclocker, the case is where it all starts. SSD is key, sure. But as I mentioned earlier, memory is where you may want to place more of your resources. So long as you try to work within the confines of a ramdisk (or multiple ramdisks), your workflow should string along smoothly.
The price will not drop and may even rise since there is a high demand for crypto mining. They are planning to release ASIC cards to avoid this problem for gamers.
I decided to just buy another PC like the one I already have. I use an SSD in both my shop and house computer and the drive works to boot either one of them just fine. However when I plug it into this new one is says “No boot device found” The drive I am using works perfectly in two other computers, and the new pc will boot from the HDD that came with it. Any ideas how I could fix this?
Is that a SATA SSD? There might be a SATA mode setting in the BIOS other than boot priority. I once had an OS failed to boot because of wrong SATA mode settings. In my BIOS I can toggle between IDE and AHCI.
Graphics cards, even used, are outrageously priced and often close to the msrp at release if it’s an upper tier card. Even so once in a while you can find a deal if you’re willing to use something a couple generations old. A few months ago I grabbed a MSI GTX 980 4GD5T Armor for $80.
