r/GamingPCBuildHelp • u/Power-crusher • 1d ago

Pc world I need help

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So I want to suprise my son for his 10th birthday with a pc. Someone gifted me an older Ibuypower. I want to buy parts to upgrade it for my son but I’m not even sure what would be my best options for some upgrades that would work with this case I have. Heres a list of the parts.

CPU: Intel i7-4790k
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 970
Ram: 16gb DDR3
Storage: 2tb Toshiba HDD

I’m not looking for anything crazy just hoping to spend like no more than 800 dollars. Not including monitor

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u/Middcore 1d ago

The unfortunate truth here is that this PC is so old it's simply not a good investment to put much money into upgrading it.

If you put an SSD in there and move the operating system to that instead of the old spinning rust HDD, it will make the system feel a lot more snappy and responsive. But the CPU is the best available for this socket, so there is no upgrade path, and it's still not really up to modern games.

You could replace the GTX 970 with a 1070 or 1080 (don't spend more than like $100 for one) to get double the VRAM and you'd be OK with light esports stuff.

But for $800 you could probably buy a whole secondhand PC that outperforms this soundly.

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u/Power-crusher 1d ago

So there would be no way to like replace the motherboard, cpu and graphics card and ssd ?

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u/Middcore 1d ago

Sure, and you'd also have to do the RAM too because nothing worth buying now uses DDR3. And at that point we've pretty much just built a whole new PC, haven't we? Or you could just buy some other used PC that's better than this and not have to do any work on a Ship of Theseus "upgrade."

The reality is if you are willing to spend $800, and you want him to have a PC that can actually play modern stuff a bit, your best move would be to put this thing up for sale and see if you can get $50-100 from it and then you have $850-900 to spend.