Upgrade MB, CPU & Memory

Alun

I have a fairly ancient desktop PC that is mainly used for general browsing, downloading and office stuff, plus a bit of video re-encoding etc. Not interested in gaming at all. It doesn't support Windows 11, and I'd like to update it with a more up to date MB and CPU so that it'll be (hopefully) future proof for the next few years.

MB: ASUS H-97-E

CPU: core i5 4460 3.2GHz

Memory : 8GB DDR 2

SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 500GB

PSU: Corsair VX450W

Case: A Coolermaster of some sort, not sure of exact model.

GPU: Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti (only bought to use NVEnc for re-encoding)

Any suggestions that won't break the bank? I'm thinking of going for an AMD build, and upping the memory to 16GB to give a decent amount for the onboard graphics. I've always gone for ASUS motherboards, but am open to suggestions. I'd be wanting to be keeping everything bar the MB, CPU and memory and scrapping the GPU. I have a NAS with plenty of free storage, so no need for a bigger SSD.

Spear

There's no need to give up the GTX 1050. Given that only a few of the AMD Ryzen CPUs have integrated GPUs, keeping it would give you more flexibility in choosing one.

minitrue

First off unless it's new I'd suggest also replacing the PSU, it's presumably closing in on 10 years old, came with a 5 year warranty, it's mean time between failure is about 11.5 years 24/7 and it doesn't seem to have an 80+ certification. Obviously you don't have to but I'd say it's time.

Second I think I'd personally go with an Intel cpu for quicksync and also AMD have just recently put the (Vega) graphics in their AM4 apus (e.g. 5600G) onto life support in terms of driver development so it feels really ugly to buy one of them now to use those graphics. I'm pretty sure at this point that quicksync would be better than your 1050ti. The 1050ti would be a better graphics card in general though but not sure you would care with the use case. You could use the 1050ti but still use quicksync for the video encoding.

You don't say anything about price etc so shooting in the dark maybe something like:

CPU: Intel Core i3-12100 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor (€113.88 @ Amazon Deutschland)

Motherboard: Gigabyte B760M DS3H DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (€111.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory (€38.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)

Power Supply: EVGA 650 BQ 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (€63.02 @ Amazon Deutschland)

Total: €327.70 (plus VAT change and delivery)

There's certainly cheaper boards, I picked that one as it has a 2.5Gb nic (if your NAS has it or can be upgraded that might be an easy worthwhile quality of life improvement) and it also has sane video outputs as opposed to some of the cheapest which are have 1 vga and 1 hdmi. If you don't care about the 2.5GB nic or pushing the ram up to 3600 instead of stock 3200, or 2 dimm slots or pretty much anything except budget you could get a ASRock H610M-HDV for about €75.

Board also has 4 Dimm slots so easy to pop in more ram, given you ran the old system for nearly 10 years I'd go with 32GB if you were getting a 2 Dimm board as you could get 2x16GB of 3200CL16 for €65 or 3600CL18 for €72, so cheaper per GB than 2x8. If the budget isn't really bothering you just get 2x16GB or 3600CL18 anyway now.

I got bored hunting for a sane manufacturers PSU in stock from Amazon Germany themselves so it's not the cheapest but is semi-modular for less cable mess. Depending how much you run the PC and your tolerance for noise you could spend more on an even more efficient PSU and/or one with fan-stop which probably wouldn't ever spin it's fan here.

Again depending on your tolerance to noise you could add a something like a €20 Thermalright cpu cooler.

Clearly you could spend more on a beefier cpu and slightly faster graphics but it doesn't sound like you need to. A 12600K or 13500 are roughly €250 and the cheapest with the slightly better graphics, a 12400 is about €170 for a hex-core with the same graphics.

You could also go AM5 at that point, a Ryzen 7600 should be just over €200, the board maybe €130 (again for 2.5GBit and not really minimal video outputs etc) and ram ballpark €125 (I'd go 6000CL30 for €135 as it's the performance sweet spot anyway and when you are using the onboard graphics I'd spend the €20 extra over CL36). That's about an extra €200 and massive overkill for future proofing I doubt you'll use and quicksync is more likely to be properly tuned to reliably work with anything whereas ymmv with the Ryzen's video encoding.

Alun

Thanks for the comments guys, much appreciated. My thoughts about going with AMD was mainly for the graphics and I mistakenly assumed all of them had integrated graphics, but if as you say Intel's quicksync is just as good I'll probably go for the Intel option. No 2.5Gbit connection on the NAS unfortunately so can go for the cheaper MB option. Lots to think about.

minitrue

This is from July last year. Note some things like the "improved h264 encoding" for AMD is Navi+ which means NOT for the AM4 apus like the 5600g. The 7600 should have the improved performance but again note the video starts with explaining how it look a long time to test the improvements as it took quite a while for the software improvements from AMD to make it into any actual software people use.

After the intro you could skip to 8:43 to where the comparisons really start, but remember he's comparing the modern stuff so not your 1050ti or the AM4 chips, there was a chart in the intro early on to give you some kind of idea about those. Or 10:19 to get straight to the real punchlines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0pCpNT4b-Q

Of course depending what you really care about maybe a modern graphics card would make you happiest to encode to AV1, sadly it's not as easy as it should be to get one of the cheap Intel cards (A310, A380) over here at the price they should be (maybe €120 though they can be $100 in the USA) and the cheapest nvidia (4060) and AMD cards (7600) which will do it are around €300!

K.O.Kiki

Do you care about future upgrades?

Because you could buy a mini PC like these Beelink ones for €300 or less

https://www.bee-link.com/catalog/product/buy?id=581

Alun

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121448906#Comment_121448906

Something like that's also a possibility but I prefer to reuse old stuff as much as possible, I've just discovered I have 16GB of the Corsair memory in a recently decommissioned HTPC box, so I can reuse that! Plus I have a DVD drive and a 3.5" HDD caddy that'd need to be connected somehow, so it's neater to just keep the existing case.

minitrue

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121448906#Comment_121448906

That's still Cezanne so same gpu family as the 5600G, GCN 5 which is Vega which I think is a pants choice generally now never mind for video encoding. It's pretty disgraceful AMD have put those gpu drivers on life support now, not for the desktop cards where they are getting long enough in the tooth to defend it but for the recent cpus which use them it's crazy.

Of course you could find similar intel machines or AMD machines using the Ryzen 6000 (say https://www.amazon.co.uk/MINISFORUM-Mercury-6400MHz-PCIe4-0-Computer/dp/B0CDWYB4JG for £360) or 7000 mobile chips, ideally the 7x40 ones which even use rdna 3 so should have AV1 support but their prices (say €800) mean you would really want a mini PC and/or low power as you could build a desktop with a latest gen (AV1) gpu for less!