Need help with a basic home PC build - 15k

J

jyogesh

Right off the assembly line
Hello,

I am looking to buy CPU, motherboard, RAM and PSU for a basic home PC. It'll mainly be used by my parents for web surfing, email and MS office work. I have a 450W Cooler Master PSU from my old PC , but I am not sure if it's working properly. Please suggests some configurations for this under 15k.

1. What is the purpose of the computer? What all applications and games are you going to run? (Stupid answers like 'gaming' or 'office work' will not work. Be exact. Which games? Which applications? Avoid the word 'et cetera.')
Ans: Web browsing, YouTube, MS office.

2. What is your overall budget? If you can extend a bit for a more balanced configuration, then mention this too.
Ans: 15k upto 18k.

3. Planning to overclock?
Ans: No

4. Which Operating System are you planning to use?
Ans: Windows 7 or 8

5. How much hard drive space is needed?
Ans: Already have a 250 GB WD SATA HDD. Going to use that.

6. Do you want to buy a monitor? If yes, please mention which screen size and resolution do you want. If you already have a monitor and want to reuse it, again mention the size and resolution of monitor you have.
Ans: No, already have a monitor (Dell 15" LCD)

7. Which components you DON'T want to buy or which components you already have and plan on reusing?
Ans: Mouse, Keyboard, UPS, HDD, Monitor and DVD drive. I also have a 256 MB Gainward Geforce 6600GT GPU (~10 yrs old!) and a 256MB ATI X850XT GPU, but I suspect the onboard graphics capability on today's motherboards would match that.

8. When are you planning to buy the system?
Ans: This week.

9. Have you ever built a desktop before or will this be done by an assembler?
Ans: Looking to self build.

10. Where do you live? Are you buying locally? Are you open to buying stuff from online shops if you don't get locally?
Ans: Bengaluru, and open to buying online.

11. Anything else which you would like to say?
Ans:

Thanks a lot for your help!
Yogesh
 
bssunilreddy

bssunilreddy

Chosen of the Omnissiah
Budget -24.3K (AMD APU)

Processor -AMD Ryzen 3 3200G -8.5k
Motherboard -Asus Prime B450M-A -6.7k
RAM -Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200Mhz 8GB -3.2k
Power Supply - Corsair CX450 -3.6k
Case -Antec NX200 RGB -2.3k



Total -24.3K

All prices are taken from Buy Online Computer Hardware | Gaming PC & Accessories | Gaming Laptops & more

Don't use the stand alone GPUs. Ryzen 3 3200G is much faster.

Sent from my Nokia 8.1 using Tapatalk
 
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omega44-xt

omega44-xt

Gear up ...
Even R3 3200G is overkill for OP. I think a Pentium CPU will do just fine & its iGPU is powerful enough for normal tasks, even powerful than those old GPUs. I think OP might have a cabinet, better to get a 120GB SSD for OS worth 1.7k or so, Kingston A400. 8GB DDR4 2400/2666MHz RAM will do for Intel based CPUs, bit cheaper, 2400MHz costs 2.4k on amazon.
 
W

whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
intel pentium g5400--5k
asus prime h310m-e--4.5k
corsair 8gb ddr4 2400Mhz ram--2.6k
corsair cx450 psu--3400
kingston a400 120gb ssd--1700
You must use win 10 as win 7/8 don't support latest hardware.
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
@abirthedevil yeah for OP a laptop may be more convenient.

Also OP if you don't have an existing Windows license, as a Linux evangelist I would suggest that you make the switch. For Youtube and other web browsing, Firefox and chrome or _insert_browser_name_here_ remain the same and instead of MS Office you have LibreOffice and OpenOffice, which are 99.9% compatible with anything that Microsoft Office can spit out. I say 0.01% incompatible because there are some proprietary formats, like a specific XML template that works on Excel but not on Libreoffice Calc.

If you go for a pirated version then with Windows 7 you are definitely risking software updates; with Windows 8 I don't remember completely; with Windows 10 you will continue to get updates AFAIK.

I personally use OpenSUSE but Kubuntu is probably the easiest distribution that a newcomer can get into. KDE's default look and feel is near-identical to Windows.
 
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whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
Extreme Gamer said:
@abirthedevil yeah for OP a laptop may be more convenient.

If you go for a pirated version then with Windows 7 you are definitely risking software updates; with Windows 8 I don't remember completely; with Windows 10 you will continue to get updates AFAIK.

I personally use OpenSUSE but Kubuntu is probably the easiest distribution that a newcomer can get into. KDE's default look and feel is near-identical to Windows.
Click to expand...
No need for piracy,one can run win 10 in "eternal trial mode" with only restrictions being a small watermark at screen corner & no personalization options(aka can't change wallpaper,themes,lock screen). If still not satisfied then MS still allows free upgrade from win 7 to win 10 without caring about how win 7 is activated(aka you know what I mean).

I also know linux is better but frankly speaking there are certain issues which hold back its mass adoption & trying to deny it would be simply to deny the reality.Apart from that,there are certain usage case scenarios where using windows is must(at least for now).
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
Okay, I've actually tried the upgrade method you are talking about. After a few months Microsoft has automatically locked down those upgrades to a deactivated state.

Also WRT linux, unless you absolutely need compatibility with specific software, like Autodesk's products or some of Adobe's professional products, you can absolutely use a linux system without knowing a lick of the command line. The package manager has a nice GUI wrapper in most user-friendly distributions, and you can certainly get a windows-like look and feel in many IDEs. What issues are you specifically speaking of?
 
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whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
There were some issues with ms activation servers a couple of times in past few months which resulted in many people upgraded from 7 to win 10 pc getting deactivated but it was temporary,as of now there is no confirmation of this(just checked mydigitallife forums & even today people used 7 to 10 free upgrade using a VM to get the genuine digital license & then transferring it to another system by linking with their ms account).

I am talking about scenarios where there is a need to use command line,as long as everything works fine there is no issue but that is an ideal situation.e.g.I see people struggling with some driver issue/recently purchased hardware where a simple solution is to just add a few lines/run a few sudo commands but this is still comparatively more complex than simply asking people to type device driver in search box & then click on question mark device & select update/uninstall/run windows update etc. For me the biggest issue with running linux is that madvr is not supported(& probably won't for a long time because of state of graphics driver development for linux). I agree it is a minority but still it is a reason enough.
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
Do you really need madVR? libav and ffmpeg list of encoders/decoders take care of practically all codec problems I have ever come across. Everyone I know uses mpv.

EDIT: Not to mention you can't exactly expect a decoder literally written for a proprietary Microsoft/Windows component to be easily made compatible with a fundamentally different OS. Wine could potentially help, but no guarantees obviously.

EDIT2: Directshow is eventually going to be replaced too.

EDIT3: mpv has the kind of shaders you want Evaluating mpv's upscaling algorithms - A study of performance and quality
 
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whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
Madvr is a video renderer considered to be the best by many video enthusiasts over at doom9 & avs forums.It uses graphics card shaders/processing power to enhance video quality & depending on source it can bring a 2080Ti to its knees at its highest quality settings(similar to a highly demanding game).Unless nvidia/amd start developing linux version of their graphics drivers in the same class(features,behaviour,everything) as windows version,I doubt madvr can ever be ported to linux.
 
Extreme Gamer

Extreme Gamer

僕はガンダム！
Vendor
whitestar_999 said:
Madvr is a video renderer considered to be the best by many video enthusiasts over at doom9 & avs forums.It uses graphics card shaders/processing power to enhance video quality & depending on source it can bring a 2080Ti to its knees at its highest quality settings(similar to a highly demanding game).Unless nvidia/amd start developing linux version of their graphics drivers in the same class(features,behaviour,everything) as windows version,I doubt madvr can ever be ported to linux.
Click to expand...

MadVR uses Directshow; that's a proprietary component from Microsoft. It doesn't use the Nvidia or AMD APIs for rendering.
 
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whitestar_999

Super Moderator
Staff member
Extreme Gamer said:
MadVR uses Directshow; that's a proprietary component from Microsoft. It doesn't use the Nvidia or AMD APIs for rendering.
Click to expand...
Directshow is used by anything display related on windows so of course it uses directshow. I just told you that it can bring a 2080Ti to its knees,do you know of any other player/software outside of pc games/video rendering/3d rendering which can do that. It uses graphics card processing power just like those adobe/autodesk products to upscale/downscale/hdr related tasks & as such is very much similar to a pc game(you can't natively run pc games(at least majority of them) on linux outside of steam,correct?)
 
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