Building a new PC for Mom

There’s actually a sale of surplus machines at a large university near me this fall. I may hold off and go check that out. Who knows maybe I can pick up and i5 or i7 machine on the cheap!

I’ve been building pc for a while now.
A tip I got for you is that people will always come back to you after a while.
So if you don’t want the constant hassle, DON´T CHEAP OUT.

If you can get a Ryzen R3 for the same price as an used Xeon, the R3 will give you the security that it would longer run.
Also, spend the extra 10 bucks on a case, you would both appreciate it.

The next one is questionable but I think you cant build a pc without an ssd in it these days.
The reason people belief that an apple laptop will have an longer lifespan is because they are not building one without it for the past +/- 7 years.

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I agree on the SSD part 100%. That is a must and there will absolutely be one in the machine.

I was looking at the R3 certainly they are a great price, My only issue with them is the platform uses DDR4 memory which raises my cost by quite a bit when I could find used DDR3 pretty cheap just about anywhere.

I like the FM2+ option
"Ma you gotta try rocket league!"

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I agree on the price part.

but honestly someone with that usage would never be using more than 8 gigs.

little sneak in the market:
Ram doesn’t really age that bad, if you wish that is one of the parts i recommend buying secondhand :wink:

Haha, maybe if she’s bored enough!

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I built my Mom a PC for Home/Work (My parents run their own business), the CPU and Mobo I used were:

CPU: Intel Core i3 6100
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2H

Together with an SSD and 8GB of DDR4 and it is more than overkill even when running Excel, Sage, Outlook, Chrome, etc all at once.

What I will say with this or any Mobo is UPDATE THE BIOS. Seriously there was a big difference between the BIOS shipped and final version for this Mobo and I had some intermittent weird issues that I’m putting down partly due to the BIOS version and partly due to running Win 7 on Skylake.

All fine now though.

That said Ryzen 3 is probably better value at this point unless that i3 is on sale.

I probably shouldn’t recommend Bulldozer/Excavator CPUs at this point since a 2C/4T Pentium beats them out, but it is a cheap platform and the APUs are going dirt cheap. Got an A10 7860K for $86 and an A8 7600 can be had for $56. Even so, the Pentium G4650 is a better bet probably. But the high tier APUs AMD has have better iGPUs than the Pentium CPUs do.

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You can’t upgrade an APU with a new CPU but you can with a better GPU.
So no, the old AMD parts are really not a smart idea.
The G4650 for a normal price though, yeah, probably fine.

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If she doesn’t do anything heavy such as video editing or gaming I might recommend buying an OEM machine rather than building it. Pre-built OEM machines are less expensive than building one at the low end.

If you really want to build it I might recommend an the older FM2 platform to keep the price down. Buy an a8-7600 or something, throw in 4GB of ram an SSD and maybe a HDD for mass storage. Put it in a Rosewill micro-ATX case with included 300w psu and you have a pretty decent build for casual use for somewhere around $200-$300.