£500 for my folks

jw191 · 28 Dec 2019 at 20:32

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.

jw191 · 29 Dec 2019 at 11:48

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?

jw191 · 2 Jan 2020 at 12:15

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 · 2 Jan 2020 at 21:04

Cheers guys, I’ve ordered some parts and will let you know how it goes.

jw191 · 12 Jan 2020 at 21:57

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?

jw191 · 13 Jan 2020 at 21:09

Cheers, did some more investigation and it was the DVD drive making the noises. Set the APU to use 256MB.