Everything except the motherboard and CPU can be recycled. The socket is just too old and you will need to resort to shady brands and/or used parts most likely.

Even the RAM can be recycled?

If I'm using this PC for office use only (email, Adobe InDesign and Acrobat Pro mostly) do you have a recommendation for a mobo and processor that would be sufficient for my needs? I can then compare the costs of replacing these items with just buying a new PC.

You're right the DDR3 RAM probably has to go too if you're going to upgrade.

I think Ryzen 3600 (6 core Zen 2) for ~$200 + cheapest MB for ~$100 and 16gb RAM for about $100 is probably your best bet. (talking USD)

Otherwise you're looking at something like this:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/mo...t=price&page=1

Specifically this LGA 1155 board for $156.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F36C3D8/?tag=pcpapi-20

to extend your machine for another two years or so.

Not sure if that's worth bothering though for your use case, you may be able to get more than 2 years. If you replace the MB, make sure you buy new thermal compound for the CPU while you're at it.

Just buy a used replacement motherboard on Ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fro...reme4&_sacat=0

Thanks grizy, that's good info.

Taking labour time and the amount of money I'm going to need to invest into consideration the best play is to buy a new PC. For about twice the cost of repairing I can get something new that will be plenty good for my office needs. I can pull those hard drives and use them for extra storage in my gaming rig so all is not lost.

Not sure if I feel great about buying a pre-owned mb from China. I'll just pick up a new pc and I can find a use for some of the components in this old rig in the new ones.

I agree with buying a new machine. Replacing the motherboard is basically rebuilding the machine labor wise and it’s almost a lock you have to spend an hour to resolve Windows issues. I’d just go to bestbuy and pick up one of the open box desktops.

Just poking around, it appears you can get a replacement for about $100. Seems worth it for a machine running non-gaming applications.

I've got a 4790k and a 970.

Is it even worth it yet to upgrade the 4790k? I assume it's time to upgrade the 970, what should I be looking at? 2060 RTX?

Do you feel slow alt tabbing and doing non gaming stuff? If so, yes, time to upgrade CPU. At main stream-ish price points, you’re probably looking at 39xx or so.

What games do you play and at what res? For non triple A titles 970 is still more than enough to get 60+ FPS at 1080p. If you bother upgrading GPU at all, probably not worth it unless you jump to 2060 Super or 2070 (they perform very similarly.)

In both cases you’re probably spending more than you expect but the previous gen chips on both CPU and GPU side aren’t enough of an upgrade from what you have.

Either I have an extremely high tolerance to my crappy OC 2500k, or you guys are crazy wanting to upgrade the CPU without any performance problems, just to tab quicker.

Unless the dude is encoding or learning models all day, what the hell is gonna lag while alt-tabbing with that CPU?

You have a K cpu, buy a 40€ cooler and OC that thing and you are still good to go. Do you really want to buy a new mobo + cpu + ram just for alt-tabbing? For maybe a 15-20% boost at max clock for the current cookie-cutter build?

You obviously don't have to work with oversized and badly built Excel models and giant word files that will bring even the most powerful gaming CPUs to their knees.

Or a bunch of Flash enterprise apps in IE.

I've got a Noctua NH-D15. But overclocking is like a foreign language to me. Messed with it a bit, but could never find something stable, and have no clue what I'm doing. So, eventually gave up.

The 970 is long enough in the tooth now that even entry level cards give it a good kicking performance wise.

The very newly released 1650 super (dont get a non super 1650) for example, only costs about 150$~. Or a an AMD RX580.

Both are much better cards and will give 60 fps in high in most titles at 1080p.

If you want to go beyond 1080p, 100fps etc future proof etc spend moah.

If you just want 1080p gaming you dont need to look at the 20 series of cards, they are overkill for that resolution, a 1660ti or 1660 super will crush at 1080p.

The thing to consider if you are gaming at 1080p (or any resolution really) is do you want to spend money to push a game from 70fps say to 85 fps at ultra?

You are not going to be playing at 70 fps and wishing it was 85.

The money getting what is pretty much just a statistical difference would be much better spent on components that will deliver a more noticeable and concrete perform boost.

The 970 gets ~80-90% of the performance of an 1650 super and is still ~30% faster than regular 1650.

If you're not going to at least something like 2060/2060 super (where I think the performance/price sweet spot is)/1660 ti, I don't think it's worth upgrading. 1660 super/TI is in a bit of a weird spot it's not really quite enough for good 1440p gaming (with high settings anyway) but is overkill for 1080p.

My honest opinion is unless you have a game you specifically want to play at 1440p at high settings (Overwatch at 1440p 100+fps is my reason), just sit on the 970 until 2160 super or something when there are titles out to take advantage of ray tracing and an RTX card (beyond the performance) actually makes sense.

I had both of those.
I didn't need to upgrade the 970, but I was getting the bug.

I went with a 2070, kept the same cpu.
It feels a lot faster, I'm able to get 100+ fps in Borderlands 3 on Ultra. I wouldn't be able to get anywhere near that on the 970.

I don't notice slow down. You could prolly stick with the 970 for another year or two, unless you're wanting to play games above 60fps.

Honestly, I wouldn't get an XX60 of anything. The XX70's are just better, and I think for the cost difference, it's worth it. Just kinda compare


http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-...Force-GTX-1060

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...6GB/2577vs3639

I like to use this site to figure out the value and stuff. It's not canon, but it helps some.

According to benches I have seen the 970 is much more 70-80 than 80-90 and that is important if you are trying to get over the hump into 60 FPS. Given how cheap the 1650 super is, its an very easy upgrade to notice substantial improvement.

1660 super makes the TI mostly redundant. Its so close in performance, but is a fair bit cheaper. I would mostly agree with the bolded but there are titles that require a bit more horse to hit the 60 fps in 1080, such as Assasins Creed OD and Metro Exodus, RDR etc and its safe to assume more titles like this are coming, so I think those cards give you some future proofing for 1080p at 60fps.

In the UK you can get a super60 for sub £200 and a 2060 is close to £270 and 2070 ~360.

So the upgrade to a card that will deliver at higher res is a much bigger outlay.

A 2060 super is basically a 2070 for less money.

Yah a super, but not a normal one.
But at the same price point, it's not much more to get a 2070 super

Probably going to upgrade tomrorow during Cyber Monday, any spec recommendations or builds to point at? Haven't ugpraded since 2012.

Recommend AMD >>> Intel at almost all price points now, exception being a gaming-only system for super high frame rates in Overwatch / CS at 1080p type gameplay with top-end kit ~9900K and 2080Ti.

Yeah, other than the top shelf 109xx/99xx SKUs and specifically for gaming, Intel's value proposition is pretty bad now.

But I think second half of 2020 will get very interesting. We know Intel is still getting more speed and IPC per core. When Intel finally moves to 10nm (which they claim to be comparable to AMD/TSMC's 7nm) for their HEDT chips, Intel will be able to cram more cores onto their chips and have better performance per core (which they already do) and take performance crown back.

I find the dynamic in this AMD/Intel rivalry to be very interesting. Intel is still ahead in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel is held back almost entirely by its failure to deliver 10nm process. (This is a seismic shift in semi-conductor industry by the way. Intel, prior to the issues with 10nm, was always half a node or even full node ahead of Samsung/TSMC.) Once Intel gets to its 10nm, judging by laptop Icelake chips' performance and efficiency levels, Intel's HEDT and server offerings should be competitive with AMD's offerings again and we should see another round of product launches and price cuts (at least for the current crop, which already has more performance and cores than 99%+ of non-graphics/VFX/video-professionals will need for the next few years.)

Competition is beautiful. I eagerly await for the 10, maybe even 7nm, Intel chips to trickle down to laptops. That probably also happens next year. That will give us a lot more thermal headroom, and perhaps even 10/12 core laptop CPUs that can boost for a few minutes at a time (this is a dream for me... an user with the niche scenario of using programs that essentially spawn tens of Excel instances to run simulations.)

I think some corrections needed there - AMD has a lead in IPC now, and a lead in power efficiency too (desktop /server wise anyhow). Intel's only saving grace is that the 9900k can reliably boost to 5GHz and even all-core clock there given decent cooling. The Zen 2 chiplets top out around 4.7, and they can't sustain that, more like 4.4 all-core - it's their IPC gains that allow them to almost rival the 9900k but they just don't have enough frequency yet.

My thoughts are Intel is in really rough shape for the near future. No 10nm in 2020, but there will be Zen 3 chiplets, and those are sooner rather than later. They have no answer to the 32-core threadripper, let alone the 64 coming in a few months. Epyc has potential to eat their server market too, though Intel inertia there is huge... but also they are where the meltdown / spectre / zombieload / endless failings really hurt.

Intel do have a seemingly solid lead in low power laptops / ultrabooks power efficiency.

I'm less hopeful AMD will ever provide competition to NVidia at the top end, but holy hell if they do it will be a crazy comeback.

I tend to agree with what you're saying in server space actually, although with the caveat, excluding multicore performance, AMD's lead in IPC/power density isn't that clear and Intel still does better in many applications, if you are comparing same number of cores (which you should not since you can buy 50% more cores with same $ now.) Keep in mind you're comparing Zen 2 produced on 7nm process to Coffee Lake Xeons produced on 14nm processes.

Intel's Icelake 10nm laptop chips are significantly ahead of Coffee/Skylake on efficiency and IPC, enough so Intel should have performance/efficiency crown on per core basis pretty much across the board.

This is not to say AMD will fall behind in server space. They have all of 2020 to make inroads into the top end of the server market just by virtue of having much higher core/silicone density than anything on Intel's roadmap extending into 2021.

I find the whole dynamic interesting because AMD's biggest advantage is TSMC's 7 nm node while Intel is stuck on its own 14nm+++++ (is it 4+s or 5+s now?). Intel can spend tens of billions (its default plan) and try to catch up on the nm race. Alternatively, and I think there is a significant chance of this happening within the next ten years, Intel could finally make the seismic decision to start outsourcing its manufacturing and focusing on chip design exclusively.

I just bought an AMD 7 7200X for peanuts during black friday, its 8 cores and 16 threads and is eating my productivity tasks alive.

Every time you buy anything you get a sense of its cost to utility, and this is just the best value purchase I have made in any area of my consuming life in years.