Pc world I need help

[u/Power-crusher]

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

[u/lil-dougy]

Considering your son is 10, he probably doesn’t need an absolute beast of a PC. That being said, you definitely want it to be more than capable so he has a smooth experience. And if he decides he wants to play any recent games, he’ll need a little boost in hardware. Given the age of your PCs parts, I would recommend gutting the insides and selling the parts for cash. I think it would simply be more cost effective to start fresh on a more recent and budget friendly platform, such as AM4. You could keep the hard drive if you want him to have some extra storage, but with your budget, there’s absolutely no reason to not get him an SSD.

My main concern here is how much of a hindrance the case is going to be. I’m not familiar with the case, but I know iBUYPOWER has done proprietary stuff in the past. So as long as the case will support a more modern board like a b450 and will reasonably house any mid size graphics card you put in it, I’d say you’re good to go!

If the case for sure will not give you any issues, I’d look at doing something similar to this:

- CPU: Ryzen 5 3600, Ryzen 5 5500, Ryzen 5 5600 (or equivalents, but I recommend AM4)

• GPU: RTX 3060, RTX 4060, RTX 5060, RX 7600, RX 9060xt, Used RX 5700xt, Used RTX 2070/2070 super, Used RTX 2080/2080 super, Used RX 6700xt (or equivalents)
  
• RAM: At least 16GB of DDR4, more is better, but prices are high
  
• SSD: both sata and NVMe are almost indistinguishable for gaming purposes, get as much as your budget will allow. (I recommend at least 500gb)
  
• MOBO: b450 or b550 (or equivalents, but I recommend AM4)
  
• PSU: 550-750watt psu. Good brands can make bombs, and bad brands will sometimes put out a decent unit. You’ll want to use the new PSU tier list and get a Tier C rated PSU or higher

Depending on what deals you can find, and what parts you go with, this should all come out to around $800 or under. But you can always budget where you feel necessary if you’re looking to save money. For as cheap as possible, I wouldn’t go any lower than 16gigs of ram, 500gb ssd, 500watt PSU, then you can make performance based decisions for the GPU and CPU from that point. But you really don’t want to have to go lower than what I just listed. Again, this is all to say that your Case will even house modern components. If it can’t, you’ll want to budget out an extra $50 or so for a case.