I'm putting together a new PC for my dad. He'll mainly use it for regular office work, browsing, and similar everyday tasks, but I'd like the system to remain useful for several years. My current parts list is an AMD Ryzen 5 8500G, ASUS PRIME B650M-A WiFi II motherboard, Kingston NV3 1TB SSD, 16GB Kingston Fury DDR5-6000 memory, and a Sharkoon Rebel P10 650W power supply. The build costs around €700, and I'd prefer not to spend more than that, although I could add roughly €100 if there's a worthwhile upgrade. Does this look balanced, and are there any obvious mistakes or parts I should change?
3 Answers
The 1TB SSD is useful if you’re transferring a lot of files from his old hard drive, but 500GB could work if most of the data will be stored elsewhere. If the price difference is small, keeping the 1TB drive is more convenient. Any money saved on storage could go toward the 8600G, which is likely a more meaningful upgrade than faster memory.
A 650W power supply is more than you need for a system using integrated graphics. A decent 500–550W unit would be enough unless you plan to install a dedicated GPU later. The rest of the build looks reasonable, although DDR5-5200 or DDR5-4800 would also be fine for office use if it saves money.
For office work, this is already more than powerful enough, and the Ryzen 5 8500G’s integrated graphics should be perfectly adequate without a dedicated graphics card. The main upgrade worth considering is the Ryzen 5 8600G if it is only slightly more expensive, since it offers noticeably better performance. Also make sure the processor includes its stock cooler; that should be sufficient for this kind of workload.
I mainly wanted to check that I wasn’t making any poor component choices, since I’m not very experienced with PC building. I’ll compare the price of the 8600G as well.
He does have a lot of old files on his hard drive, so I’m leaning toward 1TB. If I can save enough by choosing a smaller drive or a less expensive power supply, I’ll put that toward the CPU upgrade.