PC Upgrades "that are shockingly cheap"

An interesting read at http://www.pcworld.com …are-shockingly-cheap.html

I can agree with most of that, though it's common sense if you just look at prices. Just looking at budget & entry-mid range gear, most of it is at the $100 or so range. So one can get a ton of RAM, a big fat large capacity HDD, a lower capacity but good SSD, a 1080p LED monitor, a decent GPU, some good dual or quad CPUs, etc. If you're not going for a VR gaming machine to game at 4k, you're going to be fine on entry stuff. Too much gear gets stressed in competitive gaming in the sense of being competitive with everything turned on, rather than what a lot of competitive gamers do (turn all the bells & whistles off). But besides gaming, it's so cheap these days to build a good workstation, ie, something for crunching and doing tasks, where you don't need massive GPUs, and you just need storage capacity, fast copying, and plenty of CPU muscle, you can do it cheap these days. PC's don't need to be $1500+ machines to be "good." You can build very capable workstations for under $1k.

Thing is, a standard computer for general tasks that will do the job totally fine (not intense computing, editing, gaming, etc), a machine meant for typing, email, web, video watching, general tasky stuff, can be as cheap $100 total. I love my Chromebook for this kind of stuff. I bought it refurb and it does everything I need it to do for general day to day stuff as almost everything is web based now, so it fits right in while giving me a keyboard (and not resorting to a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard, tried it, didn't enjoy it).

I have a 6+ year old computer setup that is still kicking, and it's just an old AM3+ system with a quadcore phenom, 16Gb RAM, SSD, and a low end nVidia GPU, it was cheap back then, dirt now, and yet still handles my editing and video crunching just fine.

A cheap intel system can be made with the i5 6600k, it's actually only $100~150 more than an AMD system in that sense, as the components other than the motherboard are essentially the same costs.

Example of workstations (ie, meant to do a lot of work, not just browse the web, and cost of components, not meant for gaming, but can become gaming by just adding a GPU to the system, didn't even crunch to get the cheapest, just good entry and mid-tier components (so these could be better, or cheaper, etc if someone really put in some time to research bits):

AMD system:

Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 R5 ($100)
AMD FX-8370 (4ghz, 8 physical cores, comes with good cooler) ($180)
Kingston HyperX Fury 16Gb (8x2) DDR3 1866Mhz ($68)
Samsung EVO 850 500Gb SSD ($150)
WD Red (NAS) 2 TB HDD ($90)
EVGA SuperNOVA 750W 80+ Bronze, Modular PSU ($75)
Cooler Master HAF 912 (60)
$725

Intel system:

Intel Core i5 6600k ($230)
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO Cooler ($25)
MSI Z170A ($150)
Kingston HyperX Fury 16Gb (8x2) DDR4 2133Mhz ($78)
Samsung EVO 850 500Gb SSD ($150)
WD Red (NAS) 2 TB HDD ($90)
EVGA SuperNOVA 750W 80+ Bronze, Modular PSU ($75)
Cooler Master HAF 912 (60)
$858

So not a big difference in price. One can go intel if one focuses on single thread performance applications, or is tuned to add gaming to the system. One can go AMD if they crunch more video or do more encoding where the physical cores pay off, the AMD system needs a GPU added too, even a low end one is fine, the point of that system is to have 8 physical cores for that price.

Both systems can become competent gaming machines with a $100 GPU, like a simple nVidia GTX 750 Ti.

And both can be setup to run multi-monitors.

Just a thought!

.... I'm drooling for a 34" 1440p monitor at this point myself.

Very best,

That was a good read

I recently built a $250 PC with FX-6300, 256Gb SSD, 8Gb RAM. Runs great!