This computer is extremely faulty.
This computer is extremely faulty.
Budget, place? Memory size? Objectives? Aspirations? Take a look, you're in. Welcome!
It's tough to give advice without a budget in mind, but with a budget under $400 it might be smarter to support local creators or shops like Cragislist. There are plenty of budget-friendly builders on YouTube who could be great resources if you're working with limited funds.
It could be true. The A8-9600 is quite outdated, and even with a decent GPU, you probably won’t notice much improvement in frame rates. Look for alternatives like a 4th generation i5 motherboard and CPU for under $200, plus a 1060 6GB for the same price. A core i5-4460 would easily outperform it in games. Many AMD FX series CPUs have been poor choices compared to AMD APUs. Here are some listings I found on eBay: MSI Z97 Gaming 5 ATX Intel Motherboard with Intel i5-4460 CPU | eBay ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
Alternatively, you might find a Ryzen 3 3100+ motherboard under $200, which would let you outperform the i5 4460 easily. It performs almost as well as the 9400f. For around $200, you could get an 1070 Ti; a 1060 model costs over $100 and is considered a scam.
A $400 graphics card is unlikely to reach its full speed due to processor limitations. The benchmark score for an A8-9600 processor is 3,290 CPU Mark and 1,483 Threadmark. Even a Ryzen 1200 (with quad cores and no hyperthreading) achieves 6,317 CPU Mark and 1,924 Threadmark—about twice the performance of your card. I recommend considering a used AMD RX 470, RX 480, RX 570, or RX 580 for roughly $100, or an AMD 5500X if it offers good value. Look for a Ryzen 1600 or Ryzen 2600 (six cores with hyperthreading or more). For example, a Ryzen 1600 AF is around $150 new on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07XTQZJ28. If you only have one RAM stick, add a second for a performance boost of 5% to 15% in many apps and games.
I hope it still feels like a copycat, but costs keep climbing everywhere—including for pre-owned items. Most listings for the 1070 are now asking over $300 to buy new, and some under $250 are getting removed. At the end of November we even noticed a surge in prices for the Ryzen 3600 going above $300 new (luckily it’s back to the lower $200s), and with the release of the third-gen GPUs, second-gen models aren’t attracting as much attention in the used market, which is pushing prices down.