RAM for HP p6837c

[breakbonic]

I've got an HP p6837c, looks like it came with a FOXCONN 2AB1 board and AMD Athlon II X4 645 chip. HP and most retailers state ram is maxed at 16GB, my research shows the board can handle 32GB. Right now, I've got 4x4 for 16 across and a 1.5 TB hdd. I was thinking about swapping the hdd for a ssd and the 16 for 32. I guess cost would be around $250. I'm guessing the ssd will definitely improve boot time and loading, I might also think about upgrading the chip or more importantly updating/adding a graphics card (current - 3067MB ATI Radeon HD 4200 - I run two screens and one is just kind of eh (HD vs RGB).

So are making any of these changes a bad investment since this is an older machine?

 

[Lutfij]

In terms of how old this machine is any amount of money you throw at it will indeed be a lost cause however the flip-side to looking at an upgrade path is that you can and will find a plethora of deals on Ebay/Craigslist or even your local garage sale/neighbor. The latter of which may end up being a free endeavor.

According to your System integrator's specifications page the maximum ram you can populate in your system is 16GB so I'm unsure where your source of 32GB is located?
*Edit: seen here and here.

The maximum CPU you can drop into it is a hexa-core AMD Phenom II X6 10xxT Six-Core (Thuban core) which can be paired with a GTX950~980. Here is a chart to guage your current CPU strength. You will yet see a bottleneck no matter what you're going to do with this system. I'd strongly suggest that you add a good PSU(550W), a GPU(750Ti) and a CPU upgrade. Leave the ram as is. Alot of ram will only be beneficial if you're into video and photo production work.