Can someone help me pick out parts for a $400 PC for a senior. I have a family friend who just uses his computer for light tasks (I don't think he even watched youtube). He's a older fellow and wants me to build him a PC. I was thinking to get a AMD A8 6600k Black Edition, MSI A78M-E35, cheap 4GB ram, etc. Thanks
I would just use AM1
There isnt any AM1 at my local store
Is the Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-D3H compatible with the AMD A8 6600K Black Edition?
Go 300 No need to spend more money on a hardly used computer. Use the extra 100 for a monitor or something
I've built several for a non-profit which is primarily ran by retired people, so definitely senior age. My experiences have been if you know how to balance hardware, you can build a screamer for them for about $250 for just the computer without peripherals.
For their "main" computer I have an A8 5600k, and that's not even close to used to it's potential. They wanted to dabble with video and outreach with multimedia, but haven't gotten around to it. There is another build with an A4-3400 (2.7 GHz K10) paired with a 60GB SSD, and Linux Mint. They rather like that one, but the biggest problem for them is that some of the guests that use the computers need MS Word because it's the standard that LibreOffice can't quite replace, because most jobs require Word formatted documents. However, for internal documents, they've been very happy with LibreOffice and Linux Mint in general. The only nitpick they have is the GUI programmed for networked printers for Linux Mint is bugged, so I had to use CUPS to configure it. I'm hoping that got ironed out with the next release, but I'm only running LTS releases for them.
I'm in the process of building yet another computer for them, based on the quad-core Sempron 3850 for the AM1 platform. I had originally had concerns from the 1.3GHz clockspeed, as I have had owned a netbook with a 1.0 - 1.3 GHz C-60 based on Bobcat, and it was heavily CPU bottlenecked. The Sempron is a beast for everyday activities, able to eat up flash-based YouTube videos at 1080p, so it will handle web-browsing and word processing easily. I'm impressed with Jaguar - throwing 4 jaguar cores with a modern system (using Win7) and a 120GB Kingston V300 SSD makes for a very seamless and quick computing experience. I'm sure they'll love it.
My advice is that if you can get an AM1 platform, do it - very low power, very inexpensive, and more than fast enough for everyday use. If not that, an A4 series APU should be ample.
Thanks