Building a non-gaming computer for under $300?

[SirCowdog]

A co-worker of mine was asking about this. He's not really interested in making a gaming machine, but also wants to upgrade his computer from the pre-made machine he bought back in 2009.

Most of my computer knowledge and research is done on building gaming rigs. My price range is a lot higher than his. Without doing a bunch of research, I'm not even completely sure it's possible to build a halfway decent computer for the $300 he's looking to spend. But I figured I'd drop a line here to see if anyone had any suggestions.

Personally, I told that he'd probably be better off saving up more money to buy components that would last a bit longer and be more up to date, but he seems set on this path.

Keeping in mind that he's already got a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, as well as some kind of hard drive, what do you guys think? Could he get a new MB, CPU, PSU, memory, and all the cables and such and use his existing case for that little amount of money?

[durenas]

he should look at the ryzen 2200G, a cheap AM4 motherboard, some basic DDR4 Ram, and a 50 dollar PSU. That should be more than enough for his needs. Might cost a bit more than 300 dollars, though.

[Jtbrig7390]

Honestly for that low I say just get a cheap laptop since they don't care about gaming.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-...?skuId=6175415

For $319+tax isn't bad (just as a example) and its likely a all around upgrade compared to his 09 PC. But a cheap laptop route is the way I would go and just hunt around for a deal.

Also does he need a copy of windows or does he have one?

[potis]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Pentium G4400 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor ($50.19 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($39.99 @ Newegg Marketplace)
Memory: G.Skill - Aegis 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($82.89 @ OutletPC)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - 300W 80+ Bronze Certified TFX Power Supply ($40.57 @ Newegg)
Total: $213.64
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-03-17 22:40 EDT-0400

Ignore the Zen bullshit, too expensive for small builds.

With the remaining money you can choose between 240GB SSD+old case or New case+hdd, or push a bit more for 120GB SSD+ cheap new case and by more probably either 5$ less or 5$ more at 300$.

Skylake CPU instead of Kaby Lake to avoid motherboard problems since you will require someone to flash the newest BIOS with a Sky cpu installed since KB series did not release all chipset versions, if you are ordering from the same shop maybe they can build it themselves and do just that, otherwise go for the above, there wont be any difference either way.

[Fascinate]

Ya no need to jump to zen if no gaming is going to occur:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Pentium G4560 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor ($58.79 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-B250M-DS3H Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($59.89 @ OutletPC)
Memory: G.Skill - NT Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($85.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Silicon Power - Slim S55 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($62.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: EVGA - BT 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($37.88 @ OutletPC)
Total: $305.54
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-03-17 23:02 EDT-0400

About the best you can do for 3 bills, g4560 is worth the extra 8 bucks over the 4400.

[Kagthul]

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CQ4kTB
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/CQ4kTB/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 3 2200G 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($99.88 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: ASRock - A320M Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($48.26 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2666 Memory ($91.89 @ OutletPC)
Power Supply: EVGA - 400W ATX Power Supply ($32.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $273.02
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-03-18 03:25 EDT-0400

If hes got a case and drive, Ryzen is within reach and will last quite a bit longer than that pentium, but the Pentium isnt a bad chip either.

[Deleted]

Just go to a local pawnshop / second-hand IT shop and pick up a slighlty newer pre-built brand PC. Dell and HP are always safe to go, most of theese configurations were used in an office environment (at least that's the case here in Europe), so they really don't have any gaming capabilitys, but for that price tag he could easily pick up a Haswell or Skyalake i3/i5 based computer, which shouldn't be that far behind in performance from the current processor generation.

[Twoddle]

A Raspberry Pi 3 would work.

[Logwyn]

http://www.microcenter.com/product/4...sktop_Computer

And you can save a penny!

[Gray_Matter]

Please stop recommending dual cores to people. I bought 2 i3's for my kids based on recommendations here and I have already replaced one and the second one has to be replaced too. The second one isn't even being used for games at the moment. That's just from a few browser windows, Office, Google Docs, etc.

General office work needs more cores far more than it needs the raw IPC of something like a G4560.

[Kagthul]

Please stop recommending dual cores to people. I bought 2 i3's for my kids based on recommendations here and I have already replaced one and the second one has to be replaced too. The second one isn't even being used for games at the moment. That's just from a few browser windows, Office, Google Docs, etc.

General office work needs more cores far more than it needs the raw IPC of something like a G4560.

Its statements like this that make me wish the forum software didnt prevent you from putting mods on ignore.

This is so blisteringly ignorant i can barely comprehend it.

[Gray_Matter]

Its statements like this that make me wish the forum software didnt prevent you from putting mods on ignore.

This is so blisteringly ignorant i can barely comprehend it.

What general office work needs IPC?

[potis]

Please stop recommending dual cores to people. I bought 2 i3's for my kids based on recommendations here and I have already replaced one and the second one has to be replaced too. The second one isn't even being used for games at the moment. That's just from a few browser windows, Office, Google Docs, etc.

General office work needs more cores far more than it needs the raw IPC of something like a G4560.

Why exactly is that an issue? I dont get your post.

Dual Cores for general use and office stuff are perfectly fine, i have never heard a single complain from people that -actually- only use them for what they are intended, office, downloads, internet browsing.

Hell i even made Dota-only builds with G4400 before cause thats all they could afford and they had no complains.

General office work isnt graphic design programs with 200 threads.

I even made a G4560 build for a friend for WoW to move from his i7 920, he gained 25 FPS or so , but he does notice a struggle with multiple stuff open as expected.

But overall the Dual Cores are doing what they are supposed to.

[Gray_Matter]

Let me add some more detail. With a dual core, you just need 1 bad application to make the PC almost unusable. Edge is one of those examples. Every so often it starts running at 100%. There are plenty of other examples. Even Google Docs does it too. In a Chrome tab and suddenly the process goes haywire. That leaves one core to manage everything else on the box. The systems become mostly unresponsive. In this day and age there is no reason to put a dual core processor in a PC because it's lifespan will be very limited and the user experience will be well below par. There are plenty of cheap quad cores that people can get instead.

[potis]

But what you are describing has nothing to do with the actual value and power of the hardware, its just shitty programming.

The hardware does perfectly fine for its price.

Its like, literally 150$ (Before RAM explosion of prices) and now 180$ for mobo/ram/cpu to get something thats faster/as good, not even sure but they arent that much different than any laptop up to 2015 ? Maybe 2016 up to like 1000$ ones or so?

[Gray_Matter]

Why exactly is that an issue? I dont get your post.

Dual Cores for general use and office stuff are perfectly fine, i have never heard a single complain from people that -actually- only use them for what they are intended, office, downloads, internet browsing.

Hell i even made Dota-only builds with G4400 before cause thats all they could afford and they had no complains.

General office work isnt graphic design programs with 200 threads.

I just added some more info. The price difference between a dual core and a quad core is minimal. People don't start 1 app and only work on that. They start multiple apps. I'm not talking about 200 million threads, etc. Just regular usage. Casual users don't understand why they can't start Office, Outlook, Chrome with 15 pages, etc. There is an icon on the bottom of the screen so they click it. It works on the phone so why wouldn't it work on their PC. So now you have a situation where there are 15 user processes running with Chrome, as an example. It just takes one bad apple to freak the machine out. The joke is that those cores don't have to be very fast. They just need to exist so that bad application only wipes out 1/4 of the machine instead of half. You don't need a terribly powerful machine to do office work. An under clocked mobile 4 core would be twice as powerful as people need. But sticking a dual core in with operating systems working the way that they do now days ("pinned" applications, etc) is an accident waiting to happen. As it is, I have to kill a couple of processes at least once a week on my kids PC.

- - - Updated - - -

But what you are describing has nothing to do with the actual value and power of the hardware, its just shitty programming.

The hardware does perfectly fine for its price.

Its like, literally 150$ (Before RAM explosion of prices) and now 180$ for mobo/ram/cpu to get something thats faster/as good, not even sure but they arent that much different than any laptop up to 2015 ? Maybe 2016 up to like 1000$ ones or so?

Oh, I agree, it's problems with the software but that doesn't make it less of a problem. Even a second hand quad core will be much better in the long run.