AMD A6 5400K good enough?

Blaz Ferlic

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Mar 6, 2014
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Is the AMD A6 5400K good enough for casual PC use? I'm building a PC for my gf. It will replace the laptop she has. FYI It's a HP Compaq NX7300. She will be using it for internet browsing, office, movie watching and maybe some really light gaming.

I'm planing to put it all in the fractal design core 1000 with my old
SSD (SanDisk Extreme 120 GB) and a
Hitachi 1 tb HDD with
4 GB of ram for the start. Maybe later on a
50-100 bucks GPU.

Also if you can suggest a value oriented 19'' monitor!?

Any suggestion about the other components are also welcome.
Thx for the help.
 
Solution
For casual use that is plenty powerful. You won't need a GPU with that especially if you don't plan on any sort of heavy gaming even then it should still play on low or medium

Lookee Here: $155

AMD A8-5600K Trinity 3.6GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) 100w APU -- Radeon HD 7560D with GA-F2A88XM-HD3 FM2+ / A88X (Bolton D4) mATX

Acer 1920x1080 21.5" 5ms Widescreen
: $100

The trouble with 19-inch is the resolution. Spend the extra $10 for full HD.

The Radeon HD 7560D APU graphics has 256 'Turks' shaders @ 760MHz ...
50112.png

... that's just about right 😀 for "some really light GF gaming"
She'll do even better than that with 2133- or 1866MHz RAMs.
(from Anandtech)

Rule #1: Never do 'The Minimum' for your girlfriend

btw - the card of choice for dual-graphics is likely a discreet Radeon HD 6570 DDR3

 
Forgot to ask about PSU, would 300W be enough or should I go with a more powerful one?

The hardware is:

AMD A6-5400K APU
MSI FM2-A75MA-P33 motherboard
SSD (SanDisk Extreme 120 GB)
Hitachi 1 tb HDD
4 GB RAM
Maybe later on a 50-100 bucks GPU
 
300W is ok but if you want to add a GPU in future I'd advise getting atleast a 500W(from a quality maker) then you won't have to worry about if your PSU needs replacing or not.

I'll have a look for monitors now, any PC part websites you prefer to use?

Also, if it's for your girlfriend I'd actually advise getting a better processor instead of an SSD. (You can add one later)

It's more cost-effective to purchase a strong part first rather than a weak part you may wish to replace later.
 

Thx for the input.
I usually use this site to find best prices on hardware. http://geizhals.at/eu/

The PC will be used mostly for web browsing and office use ect. Gaming isn't really a concern, that's why I asked if the APU is enough for this purpose. Keep in mind that she can always use my PC which is powerful enough for anything IMHO. That is why I don't see any reason to have two powerful machines in the house. Well that and the budget of course.

My PC:
asus P8Z77 motherboard
intel i7 2600
16 gb corsair RAM
Gigabyte gtx 650 2 GB (mainly used for web browsing and photo editing, not a heavy gamer myself)
120 GB SSD
3TB WD Green
 



Sure, I'll consider the board, but can you tell me at least some advantages of these board over the a75 chipset one.
Ram will be upgraded to a second 4 gb dimm in the future, and the ssd is from my own PC as I will be upgrading to a 250 or 500 gb ssd myself.