Budget MoBo & CPU?

M491

Commendable
Sep 29, 2016
50
0
1,630
Hey guys, I am very very new to PC gaming and know very minimal information about the topic. So, before I educated myself I bought a Asus Essentio CM1630 and planned on upgrading it. So far, I have a new GPU, PSU, and 12GB ram added but I'm getting a serious CPU bottleneck. It's too late for me to just buy a whole new rig.. so does anyone know of a budget (like sub $150) micro motherboard and CPU that can handle light gaming? Thanks so much.
 
Solution
Something like this

CPU

Intel Core i3-4170 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor $119.99 Shipping $1.99 $121.98 Newegg

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H-A Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard $54.99 Amazon
I hate to say it, but you aren't going to get much for less than $150. If I were going to purchase something on the cheap, I would buy a Haswell i3, such at the 4170 and a h97 or b series mobo and reuse your RAM. That's probably about as cheap as you are going to get.
 


Hm, okay. I'll give them a look.
 
Do you live near a Microcenter?
We will need to know which GPU, PSU and RAM you have (model and number of modules and sizes).
What OS are you using? This matters because changing motherboard will de-activate Windows and if you are not running Windows 10 Anniversary Update you may not be able to activate after the change.