I am trying to help out a family that has been hit with some hard times during Covid. Their son wants a computer to do school work on and some gaming. He plays COD and similar games. They only had $250 dollars to spend but didn't know anything about what type of computer he needed. I work in an engineering office and we have spares laying around. They are older Dell Precision T3600's with Xeon 1607 processor, 8GB of 1333 Hz ECC ram and 500 GB hard drive. The current video card is a budget Quadro.
Looking for the best bang for the buck on improvements to allow him to play games. I know realistically this machine will not get top performance but his current setup is barely working so anything is an improvement. My first thoughts were upgrading ram, new video card and maybe a SSD drive. I also looked at changing from the 1607 to a Xeon 1650 but wasn't sure if that was worth it. Also, wondering about video card. Dell sells a Radeon HD 5450 that will fit the case (they are small) but wondering if it would be worth stepping up from that. Ram I am going to bump to 16 GB.
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Looking for the best bang for the buck on improvements to allow him to play games. I know realistically this machine will not get top performance but his current setup is barely working so anything is an improvement. My first thoughts were upgrading ram, new video card and maybe a SSD drive. I also looked at changing from the 1607 to a Xeon 1650 but wasn't sure if that was worth it. Also, wondering about video card. Dell sells a Radeon HD 5450 that will fit the case (they are small) but wondering if it would be worth stepping up from that. Ram I am going to bump to 16 GB.
Any recommendations would be appreciated.