Upgrade or buy new desktop PC? Opinions needed out of loop for years...

hwshi wrote: ↑ Any thoughts on the Dell XPs 8940 in the $500 range? Now with the announcements of students to work from home it gets a bit more urgent.

hwshi wrote: ↑ Noted about the parts, i do have to say I've kept this machine going for many years by upgrading and changing out bad parts. But I don't know if I have it in me to research a build and get built for $500 including os.

Anything not ring right with this ad?
https://www.kijiji.ca/v-desktop-compute ... 1600498410

hwshi wrote: ↑ Yeah I get that's what is going on. Am I winning with this situation and price or can I do better?

Sorry what do you mean by the discrete card needs to work? That the on board GPU works?

teoconca wrote: ↑ Likely not, you need to research onMB included.

hwshi wrote: ↑ according to the Intel site, that model CPU has a Intel® UHD Graphics 730 on board. Is that what you mean by your statement? To make sure it actually has on board graphics?

thriftshopper wrote: ↑ I have a similar machine (but ASUS MB, 8GB RAM) that serves as my HTPC/media player and music server as of a few days ago. 1030 card for 4K TV (and to/through 7.2 AVR for FWIW). Had a Phenom II x3 which was noisy because it got hot so I swapped out to an Athlon II x4 610e (burns less than 1/2 the power) so it is much quieter.

Sevres me pretty well for its purpose. Maybe your SSD is getting full?

teoconca wrote: ↑ If mb does not support or no slot at back, then no.

hwshi wrote: ↑ I'm not sure how I would confirm this? I checked the Dell site and it doesn't mention if there are ports specifically for the MB?

There's a picture of the back on Dell's site that appears to show several display ports that aren't all in the same slot.

M1K3Z0R wrote: ↑ You are correct that it is long in the tooth, that cpu dates back to the Core 2 Quad days. Yes still usable for basic tasks, but apart from having an SSD and at least 8GB ram there's not much that can help it go faster, even a faster/newer SSD may not help much as you'll be bottlenecked by SATA 1 or 2 speeds most likely.

Have you checked the cpu temps to ensure it is not thermal throttling? Thermal paste is always dried crusty by this point if you have not reseated the heatsink up till now. Should also check the heatsink for dust buildup.

If your SSD is full (win 10 install is usually 40GB right there by itself), or is nearing the end of its lifespan due to high writes (the 840 was an early TLC SSD with poor endurance, smaller SSDs had the poorest endurance) that will also be very detrimental to performance.

Honestly would not recommend one of those Dell units with scavenged GPUs, everything is proprietary and too many corners cut. I was tempted earlier this year as well, the specs are nice on paper but if you intend to keep it running long term it's a landfill build.

For more modern machines, perhaps look around the used market. These are bad times with inflated pricing, but generally anything i5 4th gen haswell and newer should be more than sufficient. It may actually be better to buy a cheap ryzen based laptop with decent specs and use it as a mini pc with external monitor etc, unless you have drives and expansion cards you want to use. I'm also a fan of those lenovo Tiny PCs that are basically laptop hardware without keyboard or screen, if you don't care for internal expansion they are great.

Gee wrote: ↑ The Dell are great deals at the 500$ mark

The bad part of the Dell is the proprietary nature of the computer.

- Power Supply
- Motherboard
- Case

All of the above cannot be replaced with generic parts

If you don’t tweak your computer, then get the Dell and use it till the power supply gives up the ghost. Hopefully that is going to be 5 or more years.