Upgrade help

[pastymuncher]

Just buy it and stop trying to skimp on the psu. If you take the delivery charge off that means you want to buy a psu for £40-50 and with a budget that tight you are going to end up with a rubbish psu and potentially a lot of trouble. At that price the Superflower is a steal for a fully modular, gold rated psu with a 7 year warranty. You can't get better for the price and you need to get a decent psu quickly before that garbage unit you have spits the dummy out and takes the rest of the system with it.

 

[Journey]

Thanks everyone I have looked on *** as a guide and the i7 4790 is £120, a gtx 1060 is £160 or rx570 £110 an 8gb ddr3 is £20 which comes to £250-£300 plus around £50 for a new PSU is definitely doable. Would it still be 500w he would need?

£120 for a 4790 is too much to be paying for too short of an upgrade span, especially when money isn't so easy to come by when you are 14.

If he 'MUST' upgrade, then it would be sensible to just go for the graphics card and PSU right now, and have him save up £50-70 or so, allowing him to get a new motherboard, CPU and RAM that will last many years to come. £188 for an R5 3600, £80 for a B450 board and about £60-70 for 16GB RAM, the obvious advantage is he could sell the current setup he has for around £80-100, or maybe a bit more. Thus allowing a bit of leeway with the prices or exact models being bought in a couple of months.

Don't under estimate just how much impact changing the graphics card will have, it should satisfy the itch until the monies are all there.

 

[Mother of geeks]

Hi again, everyone's advice on here has been invaluable and very much appreciated, thanks. My son has built his pc and yes I even shelled out for a decent 'gold' PSU. We originally left the CPU as is, however after adding the graphics card and PSU, his pc began freezing up. We thought this could be what bottle necking was, so upgraded his CPU to the i7. This initially seemed to work, however it's started freezing up again and we just can't seem to work out what is causing it. Has anyone got any suggestions on what we can try? Many thanks

 

[Quartz]

It is hugely unlikely that this is bottlenecking. Fire up Task Manager, change it to look at the CPU core usage, and replicate the freezing scenario. Are the cores at 100%?

It is more likely that something else is amiss. Open Event Viewer and look at the System and Application logs. Look for anything with a red icon and post it here. Also run a malware scan using Malwarebytes.