Question My friend got ripped-off when upgrading his PC, and now he wants to fix it buying piece by piece. Is it feasible?

[Richard_F909]

Hello everyone, hope any of you can help me with this one.

Background info: A friend of mine decided to learn Premiere and After Effects and in the process upgrade his PC. He took his off the shelf HP to a “guy” who charged him $500.00 USD for 32 GB of RAM, a GPU card and a couple of SSD (all of the parts are listed below).

Now his PC takes a good amount of time to boot and running the Adobe programs is out of the question. He can’t even begin a new project.

His PC currently has:

• Windows 7 Professional
• Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1225 V2 @ 3.20 GHz
• RAM 4 x 8 GB DDR3 / 1333 MHz
• Motherboard: HP 1790
• GPU: Nvidia Geforce GT 710 (Don’t know if it’s the 1 GB or the 2 GB)
• As far as I know, the PCU is HP stock.

I told him to simply build a new one from scratch but he doesn’t have the budget. He’ll consider buying just the essential parts so he can run Premiere and After Effects. But I don’t even know where to start.

I’m thinking there’s a bottle neck between the GPU, the processor, and the RAM but I don’t know what to suggest him since there might be compatibility issues.

Any suggestions on what he should buy first or if he should tweak the settings in Adobe?
Thanks.

TL;DR: My friend got ripped off when upgrading his PC and now the video editing software he’s learning won’t even run. He wants to update his computer piece by piece.

 

[Aeacus]

Yeah, it would be far easier to go with new PC rather than upgrade the current one bit by bit. Though, since you'd like advice to do it the hard way, 1st thing i'd go for would be much better (and not that expensive) GPU and PSU as well.

That being said, and without knowing the real budget, my initial suggestion would be getting GTX 1050 Ti and Seasonic Focus+ 550 PSU to go alongside with it:

PCPartPicker Part List

Video Card: MSI - GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB Video Card ($179.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($84.00 @ Amazon)
Total: $263.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-06-03 00:55 EDT-0400

GT 710 vs GTX 1050 Ti comparison: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GeForce-GT-710-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050-Ti/m77649vs3649

And since stock HP PSU is usually 300W, if even that, with low build quality; i put in good quality PSU that can power the current and future PC problem free for years to come. Focus+ 550 (80+ Gold) is powerful enough to power even the RTX 2060 and PSU comes with 10 years of warranty. (All 3x of my PCs: Skylake, Haswell and AMD are also powered by Seasonic, full specs with pics in my sig.)

2nd set of upgrades would be new CPU-MoBo-RAM combo. Here, it really depends on a budget and without one, i can't make a suggestion. But what i can do is give you this link about different rendering builds at different budgets, so you (or your friend) can figure out which CPU-MoBo-RAM combo to go for,
link: http://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/building-pc-3d-rendering-animation/