Lenovo H30 Upgrade

[Maid__]

I apologize in advance if I'm posting this in a wrong part of the forum, but here goes.

I recently bought a Lenovo H30. It has 12GB RAM. It has an AMD A6-7310 APU processor and an AMD Radeon R4 GPU. So it's obviously not very suitable for gaming. I want to upgrade it in some sort of way, to be able to play most games.

I don't know a lot about computer parts, and i have never done any sort of removal/installation of sort, on the inside of a PC. I have been looking around, looking at benchmarks of some CPUs and GPUs. So far i am thinking about buying an AMD FX-8350 CPU and an MSI GTX 950 GPU.

I guess my questions to the community are:
- Can i simply buy these and install them into my PC, without possible consequences?
- Can some of the other parts be unadaptable with the CPU and GPU? (not good enough, causing overheat of some sort)
- Is it enough to buy a CPU and a GPU or do i have to replace other parts as well?
- Have i chosen the right CPU and GPU, or do you recommend something else?
- In general, do you have any good advice?

 

[Chayan4400]

1. Probably not. The FX 8350 is a very power hungry CPU, and very few motherboards can safely supply that amount of power. I'd highly doubt that an OEM motherboard is able to handle an 8350 without blowing up later on (Figuratively, of course).

2. Two things you need to account for: Case dimensions and PSU wattage. Is this your PC?

If so, you're basically out of luck. That's whats called an SFF (Small form factor) chassis; This have very little room inside for a graphics card, and use low profile PCI-E brackets that make it basically impossible to install anything greater than a 750 Ti (Which I really can't recommend anymore for budget gaming). Here's a picture that should make things clearer:

Another thing that SFF PCs tend to have are incredibly low wattage PSUs. You need to have at least a 200W PSU to safely run a 950 which requires no external power (More on that later on). Any and you risk overloading the PSU. Even some 200W PSUs will be overloaded depending on how well (or how badly, should I say) they are made. It's trial and error here unfortunately; there's no real way to tell where your PSU falls apart from it's rated wattage, which still only gives a broad (and possibly misleading) idea.

One more thing is the cooler. As said before, the 8350 draws a lot of power. This means it also gets quite toasty. Whatever cooling system is used inside your PC to cool the CPU will probably be insufficient for cooling an 8350, which will lead to thermal throttling issues and reduced performance.

3. At this point, I'd have to recommend replacing the entire PC. There's no way you're going to be able to turn it into a semi-decent gaming PC without serious modding. You can probably salvage the RAM and HDD from this PC though. Let me know your budget and I'll put together a build for you.

4. If you build a new PC, go with Intel. AMD's FX platform is dead, and is very much overdue for an update (Which is coming through it's new yet-to-be-announced Zen architecture). For the GPU I'd recommend spending a bit more on AMD's newly announced RX 480, which will be available after the 29th of June and offers performance equivalent to the GTX 980 for $199.

5. See what's above 😀.