£500 for my folks

jw191

jw191

jw191

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Hi, looking to build a PC for my parents for general browsing, office app etc. No gaming so no GPU needed. Budget £500 including Win 10. Will be Ethernet so no Wifi needed. My starting point was:
i3 7100 3.9GHz
ASRock H310CM-HDV
Kingston A400 480GB SSD
Seagate BarraCuda 2TB
Corsair Vengence LPX 8GB
LiteOn DVD writer
Corsair VS 350
Thermaltake Versa H17
Windows 10 Home

Good spec or recommend any changes?

I don’t know anything about Ryzen, so spec is Intel based, but open to suggestions if there are better options.

Are there any light AV / Spyware applications I should install? I don’t bother on my own machine but my parents are more vulnerable.

Cheers in advance.
 
On my phone so not going to try to link but essentially a Ryzen 3200G for £80 (with built in GPU), an Asus Prime B450 mATX for around £70, 16GB 3200Mhz RAM for around £60, a Kolink Modular 500w Bronze 80+ for about £45 (not the best PSU but will be unstressed and more than sufficient and as it is modular, neat) takes you to £255.

Add that Kingston SSD or the Teamgroup L5 480GB for about £6 more which is generally well regarded. That takes you to £300. Add a case of your choice and possibly a couple of case fans so £350.

You will not need water cooling or that AIO, nor frankly a DVD drive as they are unnecessary. The extra HDD is up to you you but probably unnecessary for your described use.

Windows key probably another £20 bringing the total to £370 (depending on the case chosen).
 
The Ryzen 3200G would be the better choice since it's a quad-core / 4 thread processor while the i3 7100 is a dual-core / 4 thread processor.
 
Cheers guys, I’ll go for a Ryzen system then. They have a growing number of photos hence the additional storage. Any recommendations on where to get W10, or just take a chance on eBay / Groupon?
 
Buy windows from some where proper not ebay etc
Last thing you want is down the line their windows suddenly becomes not genuine
Windows costs what it does any where selling it too cheap is risky
 
Consider NVME instead of SSD. They are similar in price but considerably faster. This would give the PC that snappy feeling which will be appreciated in general use.
 
jw191 said:
Cheers guys, I’ll go for a Ryzen system then. They have a growing number of photos hence the additional storage. Any recommendations on where to get W10, or just take a chance on eBay / Groupon?
Click to expand...

I've brought about 10 win 10 pro keys from there over the past couple of years for £2 a pop and never had an issue.
 
as mentioned above, can go for a 3200g build with possibly a single nvme or sata ssd drive and that should be more than enough for them I think.

Throw in 8gb ram, cheap psu and mobo and you can have a full build for well under 500
 
Cheers guys. Reading lots of negative reviews for mobo’s not being shipped with Ryzen 3 support and people having to buy another processor just to update the BIOS. Any recommendations of specific boards which are known to ship with compatible BIOS?
 
jw191 said:
Cheers guys. Reading lots of negative reviews for mobo’s not being shipped with Ryzen 3 support and people having to buy another processor just to update the BIOS. Any recommendations of specific boards which are known to ship with compatible BIOS?
Click to expand...
x570 boards and the MSI MAX (it has to be the Max version) B450 boards definitely support Ryzen 3000. Plus any ones that support BIOS flashback without a CPU being installed.

I bought a Gigabyte B450i Aorus Pro ITX board in November (albeit, I was in the US when I bought it) that had a new enough BIOS for Ryzen 3000 series preinstalled on it - it did have a sticker on the box stating this too.
 
You can grab a refurbished Dell Vostro 3250 for on that famous auction site for £120-135. Small form factor, i3 6100, 4-8GB RAM, DVD-RW, 500GB HDD (swap in an SSD for ~£40) and it has Ethernet and Wi-Fi. As a bonus comes with a fully legit Windows 10 Pro license, then just get a nice compact 5TB 2.5" USB Hard drive for ~£85, or go for two smallers ones so you can keep a proper back up, two 2TB drives would be less than £80.

Complete waste of money spending £500 on a brand new machine when these refurbs look new for the most part, and would perform exactly the same as the spec you listed.
 
Unless you need it to be a desktop or least buy parts to build then you might as well get a Nuc or if you shopping elsewhere then some other mini PC with upgradeable storage and ram
 
I went with a similar build for my nan.

Can't mention competitors but I went with a ryzen 3 quad core 3200g, 8gb DDR4 ram, 120gb SSD, case PSU and a 32 inch monitor (IPS 1080p) paying full whack for Windows came to £550, so basically £450 without the full fat windows licence.

That's including a custom build fee so I didn't have to prat about, it just works out of the box.

It flies and is a very capable daily drive.
 
Total spend was £552, but that's including a 32 inch monitor, windows and a wireless AC card.

ViewSonic VX3276-MHD-2 32" Full HD IPS LED

UK Plug to C13 Mains Lead - Black
3 Year Collect & Return warranty1
Lite-On DVD drive
Microsoft Windows 10 Home - 64-Bit
1 Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB (1x 8GB)
ASUS PCE-AC51 433Mbps PCI Express WiFi Adapter
1 Western Digital Green 120GB 2.5" SATA III SSD
1 Gigabyte A320M-S2H AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard
1 CiT Classic Midi Case - Black
1 AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 3.6GHz 4 Core (Socket AM4) CPU
1 Custom Configured System Build
F1 Delivery - Priority Free Delivery
 
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I have to say, i saw the title and thought that was a low-ball offer for your folks >< Glad you got the help you needed tho, I'd trade my parents for a bit more, FYI ;)
 
Hi guys, thanks for your help. Build successfully completed. Took on board most of your recommendations, and made a few adjustments based on what was available from one supplier and what had decent reviews.

Corsair 110R
MSI B450M PRO-VDH Max mATX (delivered Ryzen 3 ready)
Ryzen 3200G
8GB Crucial 2666MHz
500GB WD Blue SATA SSD (didn’t want to deal with potential head issues of M2, and this will be plenty fast)
Seagate 2TB HDD
Corsair VS450 PSU
ASUS DVD Writer

Hardware came to £386. The case was maybe £20 pricier than I needed but it was available, looks smart, has a drive bay and good reviews.

Windows 10 64 Home Retail (digital download) £108, Office 2019 Home and Student £103, so £597 total.

Ran Prime95 just for half an hour to make sure it wouldn’t fall over. Aware this is not a full test but this machine isn’t going to get worked hard; just wanted to make sure there were no hardware faults. Idles at 35C and load temp was 67C in a 21C room which all looks fine. Ran a memory test which found no errors.

Two questions I’d appreciate some help with.

The Seagate HDD was badly packaged for shipping. It’s noisy when the system boots up (makes like robotic noises) but that might be normal. I ran CHK Disk which found no errors or bad sectors, but it was so quick I’m not confident I can rely on it. Any recommendations to properly check the disk?

Also Windows shows 6GB available memory. Some googling revealed the other 2GB has been allocated to the integrated graphics. Worked out how to reduce it in BIOS but the question is should I? It’s a little unclear how that works; some articles suggest Windows will take more back if it needs it. My parents are only going to do basic office stuff and wen browsing etc so I can’t imagine the APU will need anything like 2GB. Thoughts?
 
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