Help with New PC

[Vudak]

Hi all,

I'm trying to help out my friend, Bait, who has a woefully inadequate PC for AH3 (it's woefully inadequate for AH2 - he definitely needs a new one). 

He doesn't have much spending money and he doesn't want to build one.  He just wants to buy a pre-built one.  His budget is $650.

I found this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883102091R

Considering I have a 980M, and this card seems to be pretty comparable to this, I think he'd be good to go - but I know nothing of AMD and am not sure if that is a good processor/set up.

Also, if you can find something better for the same price or less he'd certainly appreciate it.  He's trying to take advantage of Labor Day sales.  Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you!

[Estes]

Unless you aren't able to find anything else on the video card front, I wouldn't really suggest throwing a 960 in there at this point although from what I hear it will run AH3. I'll let the AMD experts chime in, the last one I owned was an Athlon XP 3200+ lol but I don't see any big issues beyond that.

[Vudak]

Thanks. I don't know much about vid cards and so I just checked the vid card for AH3 thread that had a link with relative performance. It seems like the 960 is very slightly better than my 980m, and while I don't max out the settings, the game runs 60fps at default. I don't know enough about this stuff to know if the case, power supply, MB, etc. Will allow him to upgrade over the years though.

I couldn't find anything with a 970 that was in his budget and had a decently fast cpu...

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

[Estes]

My apologies, I completely spaced and didn't even look at the power supply. Since it's pre-built, as long as all the parts work he should be good to go. From the sounds of it anything would be a vast upgrade from what he has. Like I said, I'm far from an AMD CPU expert but unless there is something I don't know about it I don't see any reason he would have a case of buyers remorse. As I said, my only niggle is with the 10x cards out now the 960 is getting a bit long in the tooth but more than enough for AH.
 

[Brooke]

I have had good luck with low-cost Dell Inspiron Desktops, to which I add a better power supply ($50 from Newegg, and takes about 5 minutes to install) and a video card of your choosing.

An Inspiron with an Intel i5-6400, Windows 10, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB hard disk, DVD+/-RW, keyboard, and mouse is about $550, so this route might be too expensive.  If you go with an i3-6100 instead, it is $450.

So, total then would be $450 (computer) + $50 (PSU) + $200 (graphics card) = $700.  Still a tad over budget.

However, I have an older, slower Dell than that with a GTX 750 Ti card (cheaper than the GTX 960), and it plays AH3 at about 60 fps with the slider set to "none" and other things set to default.

[Brooke]

I have had good luck with low-cost Dell Inspiron Desktops, to which I add a better power supply ($50 from Newegg, and takes about 5 minutes to install) and a video card of your choosing.

An Inspiron with an Intel i5-6400, Windows 10, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB hard disk, DVD+/-RW, keyboard, and mouse is about $550, so this route might be too expensive.  If you go with an i3-6100 instead, it is $450.

So, total then would be $450 (computer) + $50 (PSU) + $200 (graphics card) = $700.  Still a tad over budget.

However, I have an older, slower Dell than that with a GTX 750 Ti card (cheaper than the GTX 960), and it plays AH3 at about 60 fps with the slider set to "none" and other things set to default.

[Brooke]

The latest Dell Inspiron Desktops have now gone to proprietary power supplies and are no longer suitable (in my opinion) for gaming.

Just wanted to add this as I have been a proponent of Inspiron Desktops in the past.

[Bizman]

Thanks for the heads up, Brooke!

As for the GTX960, it's a pretty good card. Not something to put all your sliders to 11 but definitely capable for AH3 with moderate settings. And as Estes said, a prebuild it should work well as long as the components last. A Franken-PC refurbished by someone less computer savvy is more likely to suffer from incompatibility issues.