simple upgrade

[Robert17]

My daughter's PC's MB died and she asked me to perform surgery on it. But a dead MB, ASUS M3N78 Pro running an AMD 630, inspired me to think in terms of a simple upgrade. All the other pieces and parts are usable. Their budget is o.k. but considering that they will use it for web surfing, storing photos and videos, email, really common non-techy stuff, I'm thinking the upgrade as follows would be sufficient unto their needs.

I'm posting simply to get any negative feedback such as horrid issues with the MB or the RAM smells like skunk. I'm not interested in a litany of "it won't play BF4 at Ultra settings" as that is not the intended use. But comments remain welcome. Thanks.

 

[Toastslave]

Sounds like a desktop isn't for her.

 

[Bardock]

I would go for an even cheaper A - chip. The rest look pretty solid

 

[JLK03F150]

Are you near Dallas or Houston? You might be able to save a few bucks on one of Microcenter's CPU/mobo bundles.

 

[Robert17]

Are you near Dallas or Houston? You might be able to save a few bucks on one of Microcenter's CPU/mobo bundles.

I live near Dallas, and had read this at the time. The MC is far enough away I take into account gas + time as well as sales taxes. It was cheaper to go with NewEgg.

Long story short, between the time I got the parts and now have some time to really play around with the repair/upgrade my 10-year-old Viewsonic bench monitor died. Didn't know it when I started the project. I triple checked everything else first as I was running out of ideas as to why I couldn't get video, at least as far as the MB, etc., were concerned. It wasn't the monitor cables either. So I'm now looking at a 20-year-old CRT that's still chugging along while I'm setting up the rig. Tubes, gotta love 'em.

Lesson: everything wears out. I knew that, but of course it was the last thing I checked which leads to the goofy old saying "it was in the last place I looked".

 

[Theocnoob]

A4's are a little pokey. They bottleneck the system a little bit at times just during normal 2D use. It's not terrible but it's there. Sort of feels like using an Atom with a turbocharger on it. I'd go with maybe an A6 or A8. JM2C.

 

[Robert17]

Thanks for the input. I'm deciding on whether to just let her use the iGPU or re-install the 550ti that I'd put in originally about 3 years ago. Or maybe pop my 660ti into the mix. She probably won't know the difference either way considering the usage. Most of the day was spent updating the Winderz 7 install, complete updates took 5-6 hours to integrate. Watched old movies on Netflix, surfed, clicked 'check for updates', 'install' and 'restart' to the point of considering if I'd have just bought her a copy of 8.1 and saved myself the aggravation. Linux variants are not in her future.

 

[Theocnoob]

If you have a 550Ti, I suggest an FM2+ Athlon X4. Not very expensive, decent performance for the price. With the 550Ti it'll make for a nice system. Definitely more powerful than the A4.

Or maybe even consider a Gigabyte 970AUD3P and an FX6300 for "baller performance"

 

[tungureanu]

.....

"baller performance"

but plus one on the athlon. I think the 6300 would be too hot and noisy

 

[trents]

The Propus X4 630 is very adequate for the computing tasks outlined in the original post. However, the motherboard that died is an AM2+ board while the X4 630 is an AM3 processor. So my advice would be to pick up an inexpensive micro ATX socket AM3 or AM3+ board and some DDR3 RAM and use what you already have for the remaining parts.

 

[Theocnoob]

Im talking about the Athlon X4 that is an FM2+ processor. I believe there are 3 families of Athlons, Am1, AM2+ and AM3/+