- Sep 27, 2012
- 8,890
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Hey there Tom's!
A friend of mine is going to be graduating high school soon, and for his graduation, I've been saving up a little bit of money to buy him a new computer. He's currently using a bloody ancient computer (I think a Pentium 4) with integrated graphics. He's also getting more and more disillusioned with the xbox, and is slowly moving to the PC, mostly because he sees my experiences.
He's been wanting a computer, but is VERY bad with money, so my deal with him is that we'll both save up, and I'll match whatever he puts into the build. I'm expecting this will be about $200 from each of us. What I want to do is build him a barebones rig that he can then save up and upgrade later.
In this spirit, I'll be giving him my old 9800 GT and a Gigabyte z77x-ud3h that I've got laying around, to be paid back for at a nominal price or returned later. My question for this is that since I want to get him a good case and power supply from the start, along with 4GB of RAM and a small SSD (he's used to a 80GB hard drive, so a 128GB SSD will be plenty), I wanted to get a used processor that would fit well to the used graphics card I'm giving him.
So.. I figured a sandy bridge Pentium would be perfect; they can be found on ebay for cheaper than the 4GB of ram, so we're all good there. My only question is whether there will be compatibility issues if I try to use the 9800GT in a PCI 3.0 slot with a chip that doesn't support it. I know that it wouldn't bottleneck or anything even in a 1.1 slot, but I just want to make sure I'm not setting myself up for failure from the start.
A friend of mine is going to be graduating high school soon, and for his graduation, I've been saving up a little bit of money to buy him a new computer. He's currently using a bloody ancient computer (I think a Pentium 4) with integrated graphics. He's also getting more and more disillusioned with the xbox, and is slowly moving to the PC, mostly because he sees my experiences.
He's been wanting a computer, but is VERY bad with money, so my deal with him is that we'll both save up, and I'll match whatever he puts into the build. I'm expecting this will be about $200 from each of us. What I want to do is build him a barebones rig that he can then save up and upgrade later.
In this spirit, I'll be giving him my old 9800 GT and a Gigabyte z77x-ud3h that I've got laying around, to be paid back for at a nominal price or returned later. My question for this is that since I want to get him a good case and power supply from the start, along with 4GB of RAM and a small SSD (he's used to a 80GB hard drive, so a 128GB SSD will be plenty), I wanted to get a used processor that would fit well to the used graphics card I'm giving him.
So.. I figured a sandy bridge Pentium would be perfect; they can be found on ebay for cheaper than the 4GB of ram, so we're all good there. My only question is whether there will be compatibility issues if I try to use the 9800GT in a PCI 3.0 slot with a chip that doesn't support it. I know that it wouldn't bottleneck or anything even in a 1.1 slot, but I just want to make sure I'm not setting myself up for failure from the start.
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