Budget office build

[rayz]

Need to upgrade my office machine. Currently running XP with an ancient 2.8ghz Pentium 4. Only use is business related. Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet, accessing the CRM..etc. I often have 4-5 tabs open in Firefox and multiple other apps running at once. What Intel based CPU under $100 would be a good bet?

 

[Ryoohki360]

The main question is how much money do you have on the whole system..

 

[Evil Scooter]

If you are just now noticing a performance hit a Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge with a speedy SSD and decent amount of ram (DDR3 is dirt cheap nowadays.. load up) would probably last you another 5 years. About $90 for the G850 at the egg.

GL

 

[Zangmonkey]

The main question is how much money do you have on the whole system..

This is really the important question.

Also, do you need dual display?
What parts are you taking from your current system (if any?)

 

[Ryoohki360]

Personally i would go with a AMD A8 APU, their cheap and they are excellent for office GPU/CPU, they provide easy 1080p video playback. A cheap Matx board from ASUS, 8 gig of ram (it's dirt cheap), a HDD (cost more due to flooding) or a 80gig SSD, a Small form factor case, 430W PSU, a DVDROM (SATA)

If you perfer INTEL, you can get about the same with a I3 from Intel, just less GPU performance..

100$ for the APU
80$ for the MB
40$ Ram
150$ for HDD or SSD (or less)
45$ for 430W PSU
20$ for teh DVDROM
40$ for the case

so you're looking at about

475$ and less for a whole system that would be Night and Day with you're current system

BTW the price are out of my head, i just made a similar build last week

 

[Zangmonkey]

Personally i would go with a AMD A8 APU, their cheap and they are excellent for office GPU/CPU, they provide easy 1080p video playback. A cheap Matx board from ASUS, 8 gig of ram (it's dirt cheap), a HDD (cost more due to flooding) or a 80gig SSD, a Small form factor case, 430W PSU, a DVDROM (SATA)

100$ for the APU
80$ for the MB
40$ Ram
150$ for HDD or SSD (or less)
45$ for 430W PSU
20$ for teh DVDROM
40$ for the case

so you're looking at about

475$ and less for a whole system that would be Night and Day with you're current system

BTW the price are out of my head, i just made a similar build last week

For $475 he's better suited with an i3

 

[DooKey]

I'd go with a cheap H61 MB and a Pentium C860 processor with 4gb of DDR3.

 

[rayz]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I have items like PSUs, Cases, RAM and maybe even some HDDs at my disposal. All I would be looking for is the CPU/Mobo.

And to answer an earlier question, I've noticed a performance lag for a while now. I just can't take it anymore, especially coming from the home pc in my sig

No dual display

 

[Ryoohki360]

Yeah but you're RAM have to be DDR3 and nowaday HDD and DVDROM has to be SATA because they removed IDE port from most motherboards.. be sure to check for that too..