(I'm experienced with custom PC builds, but have never made one with so little funds, hence this question.)
A friend of mine only has $200 to spend on a computer. We found an older HP Pavilion Media Center m8530f for $50 at a garage sale, which is only missing a hard drive. Granted, it only has 512mb of RAM, and a crappy video card, so we are looking at upgrading both. The problem is that, according to the spec page given below, this computer can only accept a very specific type of DDR2 RAM, that is more expensive in the 2GB QTY we would need than if I were to be buying two sticks of 4GB DDR3...
So, here is a general idea of the specs we would like in a computer:
-750GB HDD (On amazon, a 1TB is just as expensive as a 500GB, so we might just do that...)
-8GB Ram
-A decent video card (He wants it for gaming, and is fine with lower res. However, the included video card is just awful.) We were thinking of spending a good $70 on this one.
-Decent Processor (Should be able to play games on low settings.)
The question is, should we invest in this desktop computer, and spend the remaining money upgrading it, or would it be better to start from scratch? I'm thinking that for $50, the case, power supply, and decent quad-core CPU are worth the money, even if everything else gets upgraded...
Thank you all for your help! Although you don't have to, links to each item you would use in your upgrade/build suggestion would be appreciated.
A friend of mine only has $200 to spend on a computer. We found an older HP Pavilion Media Center m8530f for $50 at a garage sale, which is only missing a hard drive. Granted, it only has 512mb of RAM, and a crappy video card, so we are looking at upgrading both. The problem is that, according to the spec page given below, this computer can only accept a very specific type of DDR2 RAM, that is more expensive in the 2GB QTY we would need than if I were to be buying two sticks of 4GB DDR3...
So, here is a general idea of the specs we would like in a computer:
-750GB HDD (On amazon, a 1TB is just as expensive as a 500GB, so we might just do that...)
-8GB Ram
-A decent video card (He wants it for gaming, and is fine with lower res. However, the included video card is just awful.) We were thinking of spending a good $70 on this one.
-Decent Processor (Should be able to play games on low settings.)
The question is, should we invest in this desktop computer, and spend the remaining money upgrading it, or would it be better to start from scratch? I'm thinking that for $50, the case, power supply, and decent quad-core CPU are worth the money, even if everything else gets upgraded...
Thank you all for your help! Although you don't have to, links to each item you would use in your upgrade/build suggestion would be appreciated.
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