$500 Bonus From Work Looking to Buy a New PC

Hey guys, exciting day today I got an award from work for being an excellent Patient Care Tech at my Hospital so I'm thinking it's time to get a better toaster.

My Current SystemAMD FX4130 3.8ghz8g Ram500g HDGeoforce GTX650

I've got $500 is this an upgrade?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6D79371

If not what do you suggest?

Idk if what I'm recommending will be in your price range or not but I got a pretty decent pre-built PC for ~$1000

More Ram ~16gb will help you play more demanding games1tb HDD will allow you to store more120gb SSD will allow GW2 to get through loading screens faster if it's installed on the SSDGTX 1060 3gb will allow you to play many, many games on the steam market right now even though it's the lowest VRAM modelPersonally I like Intel's i5 or higher and have no experience with Ryzen but you can look up comparisons

Building a PC is going to be hard with all of the crypto mining going on, but I wouldn't recommend anything less than a GTX1060 (Unless GW2 is all you play).The only thing about my PC is that there's not much room for customization and the only upgrade in graphics cards that my power source could handle (With like no extra) would be a 1070 so take that into account if you're ever looking to upgrade a part.

Hope this helps.

@"Oldirtbeard.9834" said:Hey guys, exciting day today I got an award from work for being an excellent Patient Care Tech at my Hospital so I'm thinking it's time to get a better toaster.

My Current SystemAMD FX4130 3.8ghz8g Ram500g HDGeoforce GTX650

I've got $500 is this an upgrade?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6D79371

If not what do you suggest?

If it was me I would spend that money on an 8700K and build my own PC. I would take a 0% credit card out just to finish it if I had too, but I'm in debt because of buying a new vehicle so I can't afford it at the moment.

Pick up an 8700k, a nice motherboard, 16gb of half decent ram for now, a 250gb samsung evo SSD and just use your old graphics card until you can afford to get a GTX 1080Ti ;)

Now that's a PC that will be viable for a very, very, long time.

Thank you for the feed back everyone

It will run GW2 fine, you'll certainly notice the difference. Be a lot quieter as well. With RAM and Graphics prices atm it looks a good deal (no idea on being the best). The 1400 should be a serious bump over the FX4....

Only niggle is the 1tb mech drive, so plan on getting a ssd in future - the effect will only be slower texture loading - however for some reason Windows Updater 10 loves to churn and churn on mech drives on boot-up (twice a month on Tuesdays) - which really is annoying. Well worth trying to get a ssd prior to buying as it will be much easier to clone the OS over (120gb will do but >240gb is probably best value for money, any brand will do as most have pretty much the same read speeds) See if you can flog your old PC to get the ssd. or borrow with that in mind.

Otherwise wait for the 2400G desktops to hit the shops with ssd in them ... better cpu poorer igpu. Pricing should be approximately the same.

If your a casual gamer. Id just get more ram (if you can) and a Nevida 1050. ($200) ..1060 ($569)1050 is good enough for guild wars. I might get one. Im using a 750 ti right now.Neeman Oria.7504 is right. video cards are crazy in price right now.

@lilypop.7819 said:It will run GW2 fine, you'll certainly notice the difference. Be a lot quieter as well. With RAM and Graphics prices atm it looks a good deal (no idea on being the best). The 1400 should be a serious bump over the FX4....

Only niggle is the 1tb mech drive, so plan on getting a ssd in future - the effect will only be slower texture loading - however for some reason Windows Updater 10 loves to churn and churn on mech drives on boot-up (twice a month on Tuesdays) - which really is annoying. Well worth trying to get a ssd prior to buying as it will be much easier to clone the OS over (120gb will do but >240gb is probably best value for money, any brand will do as most have pretty much the same read speeds) See if you can flog your old PC to get the ssd. or borrow with that in mind.

Otherwise wait for the 2400G desktops to hit the shops with ssd in them ... better cpu poorer igpu. Pricing should be approximately the same.

Unless you're just going to put the OS on the SSD, I would recommend at minimum a 250 GB SSD if not a larger one. And even the 250 GB SSD will get full fast if you aren't careful.

@lilypop.7819 said:It will run GW2 fine, you'll certainly notice the difference. Be a lot quieter as well. With RAM and Graphics prices atm it looks a good deal (no idea on being the best). The 1400 should be a serious bump over the FX4....

Only niggle is the 1tb mech drive, so plan on getting a ssd in future - the effect will only be slower texture loading - however for some reason Windows Updater 10 loves to churn and churn on mech drives on boot-up (twice a month on Tuesdays) - which really is annoying. Well worth trying to get a ssd prior to buying as it will be much easier to clone the OS over (120gb will do but >240gb is probably best value for money, any brand will do as most have pretty much the same read speeds) See if you can flog your old PC to get the ssd. or borrow with that in mind.

Otherwise wait for the 2400G desktops to hit the shops with ssd in them ... better cpu poorer igpu. Pricing should be approximately the same.

Yeah an SSD is pretty much essential for running windows 10. I just upgraded to an SSD and went from about 30 seconds boot time to 11 seconds. I wouldn't say I've noticed GW2 running better with the SSD but alt tabbing in and out of the game and everything else is such a breeze now. I got my Samsung Evo 250GB for about £80 on Amazon.

As people have mentioned, I’d also recommend a bigger SSD. I’m considering a 850 EVO 500GB atleast myself. I currently have an almost full 250gb SSD. But I’m not in a rush to upgrade it right this moment.500gb SSD would be roughly £60 more expensive than the 250gb. You can always look into financing for certain parts/entire “shopping lists” (eg. Ebuyer is 14.9% fixed, and Paypal is also relatively competitive at 17.9% variable, but you get 0% for 4months on purchases over £150). Not advising on which to pick but definitely do a bit of digging and research if you wanted to go this route.

@Haleydawn.3764 said:As people have mentioned, I’d also recommend a bigger SSD. I’m considering a 850 EVO 500GB atleast myself. I currently have an almost full 250gb SSD. But I’m not in a rush to upgrade it right this moment.500gb SSD would be roughly £60 more expensive than the 250gb. You can always look into financing for certain parts/entire “shopping lists” (eg. Ebuyer is 14.9% fixed, and Paypal is also relatively competitive at 17.9% variable, but you get 0% for 4months on purchases over £150). Not advising on which to pick but definitely do a bit of digging and research if you wanted to go this route.

There are actually plenty of 0% credit cards out there with up to 30 months no interest fee's. I know because I do a lot of stoozing, which means you pay for everything you can on a 0% credit card, so you can leave your pay in your current account and spend it at will. Effectively I can use this as a 0% interest personal loan rather than doing finance and paying interest fees.

As for getting a bigger SSD, it depends if you have a lot of games, programs, and apps you plan on using as you'll want them on your SSD, if you don't then 250gb is fine and you can always add another later. If you do a lot of downloading torrents, tv series and films e.t.c. I would get a 250gb SSD and a 1TB HDD.

Wait for the new generation of CPU's and for GPU prices to perhaps go down. And if you're mainly going to be playing gw2, please do spend the majority of your budget on a CPU as buying an i5 and a gtx 1060 will result in a huge bottleneck in gw2. And it has to be said but currently intel > amd when it comes to games.And a 250gb SSD will be a huge quality of life change for everything in your computer.16GB of ram would not make much of a difference in gw2 but if it fits the budget go for it.And do take care who you listen to, 99% of the comments on building-a-pc threads are by people who have no idea what they're talking about and are using buzzwords they found on the internet, or copied their opinion from someone else who has no idea what they're talking about. Do your own research.

@Seera.5916 said:

@lilypop.7819 said:It will run GW2 fine, you'll certainly notice the difference. Be a lot quieter as well. With RAM and Graphics prices atm it looks a good deal (no idea on being the best). The 1400 should be a serious bump over the FX4....

Only niggle is the 1tb mech drive, so plan on getting a ssd in future - the effect will only be slower texture loading - however for some reason Windows Updater 10 loves to churn and churn on mech drives on boot-up (twice a month on Tuesdays) - which really is annoying. Well worth trying to get a ssd prior to buying as it will be much easier to clone the OS over (120gb will do but >240gb is probably best value for money, any brand will do as most have pretty much the same read speeds) See if you can flog your old PC to get the ssd. or borrow with that in mind.

Otherwise wait for the 2400G desktops to hit the shops with ssd in them ... better cpu poorer igpu. Pricing should be approximately the same.

I have two gaming machines, one with GW2 on a SSD and another on a mech drive. Former is more responsive on loading and with textures but very minor for gameplay issues.

For what its worth I am just building a new gaming PC based on the Ryzen 5 1600, for that I used a Samsung 240GB PCIe Gen M2 3x4 drive - mainly because its a mITX motherboard with the M2 socket underneath, so a devil to install later. Think the markup over a normal SSD was 30%. Not worth it at the moment but less hassle later imo. My point is that these types of drives are the way the market is moving so I wouldn't splash out on a large expensive SSD if it is going to end up as a secondary, since imo mech drives still hold there own for storaging lots of games. Might be different for AAA shoot-em-up games like BF2 etc. SDD for OS+App and mech for media and games is ideal atm.

Additionally as I now have some direct experience of the new Ryzen cores, I would say that 4-core 1400 looks real sweet (I feel I have two spare cores with the new build), and the 2400G is likely to be even sweeter as far as GW2 players are concerned (I am pretty sure the graphics are above the R7 260x I use on one machine). Fairly certain the 2400G will be highly enjoyable experience for GW2 gamers - assuming you can eat the 8GB RAM prices - those are four very powerful cores. The other thing to mention is the power efficiency of these Ryzen cpus, there is a chance that if the new build lasts 8 to 10 years I will recover the cost of the CPU in reduced electricity costs whilst gaming alone!