Desktop decisions - advice welcomed!

[lnr]

Mike has bought himself a new shiny desktop, and now I'm looking at what to do with what we've still got in the house, or whether to buy in an entire new machine.

I'm currently running a 4th gen i7, with a Radeon GT1030 and 12GB of memory, and a 512MB SSD. But the motherboard and processor and some of the memory technically still belong to work.

I was thinking of migrating my computer's brain into Mike's old machine, but it turns out that's a 3rd gen i7, so less good, though it has a Radeon GTX1070 instead, so much better graphics. I could probably get some performance improvement by sticking that in my chassis (*if* it has enough power) and seeing if I can up the memory too.

Or I could spend 900 quid on a 10th gen i7 system from Dell with the Radeon GTX 1650 super, it only comes with 8GB of memory but that's on one DIMM so almost certainly possible to add more from our stock.

Have decided against spending a small fortune on the shiny gaming PCs they also have available, as I'm just not enough into ALL THE POWER, and mostly it would just be nice to have something that actually belongs to me and can at some point do Windows 11, which neither of the existing i7s are new enough for.

The 900 quid Dell Inspiron is looking quite tempting. Anyone want to suggest other ideas?

Comments

[catyak]

To me, the important thing is memory. I'm still using an i5 from 2013 that I built from scratch, but it's had 32GB RAM in it for most of that time and is good for most of what I do. Mind you, I do run Linux and don't bother with action games (graphics controller is a GTX750) and it's still perfectly adequate for that. It got fitted with an SSD for /usr some time ago (when 64GB was a lot) to keep the program load speed up, but otherwise it's pretty much the same as it started apart from the extra pound or two of dust inside it.

[lnr]

Switching to SSD really does make a difference, doesn't it?

[catyak]

Most storage is still on traditional hard drives, but yes, having the system files on SSD helps a lot. Also makes software upgrades easier, because my data is on a separate disk to where all the reformatting and installation takes place.