About 4 years ago I donated my old gaming PC to a friends kid who was having some tough times (Dad up and left them, blah blah, not really relevant here), but in my view showed a lot of promise with respect to a decent career in programming.
The PC was basically an i5-2500K, 16GB DDR3, RX 480 8GB, and some old 250GB drives striped together to give a bit of IO performance.
Over the years, I've helped out here and there with HDD replacements, new PC case, an AIO, and helping reload Windows when he screwed something up.
He's now 15, and complaining about how slow the PC is when gaming.
There is no way I'm able to (nor want to) splash out on any sort of decent performance upgrade for him.
He's at the age where I believe he needs to start learning a bit of accountability, so we've been chatting about him getting a job to pay for this upgrade he wants.
We think about R6k should be sufficient to upgrade either the CPU/Mobo/Ram to something more modern, OR to upgrade his GPU.
I think he could probably sell his current CPU/Mobo/Ram for R1k giving us R7k
I was thinking of something like a 10600K CPU, B460 Mobo and 16GB G.Skill 3000Mhz CL16 Ram.
Or he could sell his GPU. Not sure what a Powercolor RX 480 8GB would go for these days, but that would hopefully give us R8k or R9k to work with, and he get either something like a 1080 Ti, or go a bit more modern and try push for a RX 6600XT or 3060.
A CPU upgrade will give him a better gaming experience, and we could OC the CPU to 4.0Ghz as well, but a decent CPU upgrade is probably better on balance.
Any other options we should consider?
In the meantime, he still needs to get a job and earn some bucks.
The PC was basically an i5-2500K, 16GB DDR3, RX 480 8GB, and some old 250GB drives striped together to give a bit of IO performance.
Over the years, I've helped out here and there with HDD replacements, new PC case, an AIO, and helping reload Windows when he screwed something up.
He's now 15, and complaining about how slow the PC is when gaming.
There is no way I'm able to (nor want to) splash out on any sort of decent performance upgrade for him.
He's at the age where I believe he needs to start learning a bit of accountability, so we've been chatting about him getting a job to pay for this upgrade he wants.
We think about R6k should be sufficient to upgrade either the CPU/Mobo/Ram to something more modern, OR to upgrade his GPU.
I think he could probably sell his current CPU/Mobo/Ram for R1k giving us R7k
I was thinking of something like a 10600K CPU, B460 Mobo and 16GB G.Skill 3000Mhz CL16 Ram.
Or he could sell his GPU. Not sure what a Powercolor RX 480 8GB would go for these days, but that would hopefully give us R8k or R9k to work with, and he get either something like a 1080 Ti, or go a bit more modern and try push for a RX 6600XT or 3060.
A CPU upgrade will give him a better gaming experience, and we could OC the CPU to 4.0Ghz as well, but a decent CPU upgrade is probably better on balance.
Any other options we should consider?
In the meantime, he still needs to get a job and earn some bucks.