HELP Using A Different Processor In A Prebuilt?

Hardware CPU
1

I have built a few PCs before but have never tried using parts from a consumer grade prebuilt. My friend wants to do a budget build and I agreed to give him any parts that i have spares of, last year I got a "busted" Acer ATC-605-UB11 (heres a link) that ended up just having a dead hard drive.

My neighbor gave it to me for free thinking it was junk and I was able to salvage a great little processor out of it that I used in another friend's build. Well now I still have everything else including the motherboard and RAM (it seems only to be compatible with this MOBO) and if we could reuse these it would cut out a ton of the cost.

Now like I said I no longer have the original processor and we don't have the budget to spend $170 on another i5-4440, would there be an issue with using an i3-4170 with its motherboard. I know there are issues with upgrading processors in motherboards like this but what about downgrading?

Thanks in advance for any help I can get.

2

yes the the i3-4170 will work. the key thing is to look at the year of the latest bios update and see if it was released before or after the cpu was made. though in most cases just about all haswell desktop cpus will work even K series you just need to use intel xtu instead of your bios to overclock.

3

The motherboard in that thing should be compatible with any socket 1150 CPU.

4

Thank you so much, I have read about there being problems with putting a better CPU in, but I had no idea what to think of this, this helps us out so much

5

The BIOS for the prebuilts usually do not support Engineering Samples, QS or non retail SKU's.

Often there are ways of hacking the BIOS to add the SKU but you need a cpu to boot the board to hack the BIOS if this is on your list of things to do.