Advice on an upgrade bundle please?

Nick Stevens · 2 Jun 2020 at 15:56

Hi
I'm new here so please go gentle...
I bought my son a Chillblast PC a few years ago and have managed to add an additional 1060 Graphics card but I'm looking for a hardware bundle upgrade (board, processor and memory) for around the £300 mark to boost speed and get a good basic platform for future upgrading as he gets older (12 now)
Current set up is :
Processor: AMD A10-7860K Black Edition CPU, 4 Cores, 3.6 - 4GHz
Case: Chillblast F3 Gaming Case - Black / White
Graphics Card: Integrated Radeon R7 Graphics
Additional Graphics card fitted: Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 Mini 3072MbGDDR5
CPU Cooler: AMD Stock CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste: Standard Thermal Paste
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-HD2 Motherboard
Memory: 8GB DDR3 1866MHz Memory (2 x 4GB Sticks)
Solid State Drives: No
Hard Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD Hybrid Drive
Cable case for additional HDDs: No
Power Supply: Aerocool 80 PLUS 500W PSU
Sound Card: Onboard High Definition Audio
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit

Any advice or guidance would be very appreciated
(ageing Dad who mainly works on Macs !)

Charlatan · 2 Jun 2020 at 16:19

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Asrock B450 Pro4 (Socket AM4) DDR4 ATX Motherboard= £79.99
1 x AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail= £179.99
1 x Team Group Vulcan TUF Gaming Alliance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Blac= £79.99

Total: £350.47 (includes shipping: £10.50)

Mobo out of stock, you should be able to source one elsewhere, and shave about £25 off the CPU shopping around.

I would be tempted add another £100 to your budget and to upgrade your PSU and add a small ssd for the OS

Nick Stevens · 2 Jun 2020 at 21:52

Thanks for the spec. SSD will be a good idea, does it give more speed or is it just for the OS and faster boot up? If I looked at a better PSU which one would you recommend? Also, at the moment my son uses the Integrated HDMI for one monitor and the HDMI off the 1060 for another giving him split screens. How would I achieve the same with the new Motherboard only having one HDMI?
Sorry for all the question

Lemin · 2 Jun 2020 at 22:22

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Seasonic Core Gold GM-650 650W 80+ Gold Modular Power Supply= £89.99
1 x Kingston A400 240GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Hard Drive - (SA400S37/240G)= £35.99

Total: £136.48 (includes shipping: £10.50)

very few psus in stock now, you should run both monitors off the 1060

Nick Stevens · 5 Jun 2020 at 11:06

Could I add in the SSD now just to get that done and out the way? Is it easy to transfer the OS over to it ?

Charlatan · 5 Jun 2020 at 11:11

Yes, but I wouldn't bother. Better to do a clean install on the new system

Nick Stevens · 10 Jun 2020 at 21:32

Hi again
I've been reading through various posts about upgrades and keep seeing something about 'AMD's B550 motherboards are out next week. Maybe AMD's 3000XT CPUs too.'
Would this change any thing on the recommendations given so far as I've got another week before I have to bite the bullet?

Nick Stevens · 21 Jun 2020 at 21:59

Hi
So I installed the recommended Asrock MoBo, ram and ryzen5 processor and all went well (thank god)
My problem now is it seems there is no built in gpu in this set up now! So my question is why does the board have hdmi, dvi etc on it but I can’t get a signal from them, and how do I now get split monitor set up as previous using the Zotac gtx 1060 mini graphics when it has 1 hdmi and 3 display ports ? thanks in advance

Tetras · 21 Jun 2020 at 22:30

You need 2x HDMI but the Zotac only has 1 right? You can get a cable to convert between hdmi/dp, probably easiest way to do it.

Charlatan · 23 Jun 2020 at 15:27

Nick Stevens said:
Hi
So I installed the recommended Asrock MoBo, ram and ryzen5 processor and all went well (thank god)
My problem now is it seems there is no built in gpu in this set up now! So my question is why does the board have hdmi, dvi etc on it but I can’t get a signal from them, and how do I now get split monitor set up as previous using the Zotac gtx 1060 mini graphics when it has 1 hdmi and 3 display ports ? thanks in advance

Only the 3200G and 3400G have onboard graphics, thats what the ports on the motherboard are for. You may need a DVI to HDMI converter, or similar depending what ports you have on the 1060

Lemin · 23 Jun 2020 at 15:49

Gpu has 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x DL-DVI, if your monitors are both dvi google something like,,,,,

DisplayPort to DVI, Benfei DisplayPort to DVI-D Single Link Adapter Male to Female