New PC

[jtr63]

Does anyone have recommendations for PC build / suppliers. My son wants to replace his aging desktop - upgrade not realistic. I'd like to have a bit of flexibility on the specification and don't want to use a shed.

TIA
John

[U962]

Try Chilliblast if you want a firm that will build to a spec with a wide range of options to customise the build

[Urbandreamer]

Does anyone have recommendations for PC build / suppliers. My son wants to replace his aging desktop - upgrade not realistic. I'd like to have a bit of flexibility on the specification and don't want to use a shed.

TIA
John

Are you sure that an upgrade is not possible?
You could be correct, but I recently bought a dog slow Dell to replace a dog slow HP.
The Dell has a far higher spec CPU, so I started investigating what the problem was.

I boosted the ram, for the princely sum of £5 and fitted a SATA SSD. Wow the improvement.
Looking further I found that the bios didn't support NVME SSD's so that is as far as I got. Though I did find a web page about patching the bios.

For those who don't know, if you have a spare X4, X8 or X16 PCIe connector you can get a huge boost by using a NVME SSD. Modern computers have a M.2 slot for the purpose, but you can achieve the same using a daughter board.

That said, you are unlikely to have such a spare slot if you use a graphics card, as X4 and X8 slots are rare and the X16 slot is normally used for graphics.

It all depends upon what your son uses his desktop for. RAM and a fast "hard disk" will make opening up applications snappy, but it if you are transcoding video then you probably need a graphics card and good CPU.

What is the current spec of the aging desktop? What CPU. How much RAM. What type of "hard disk". What is it used for?

[GeoffF100]

What does your son do with the PC? What is the hardware and software spec of the PC? Make and model number?

[ukmtk]

I actually run Mint Linux on 2nd hand laptops I bought on Amazon (old ThinkPads/16GB RAM/512GB SSD)
They were relatively cheap and very clean from the dealers.
I just use external monitor, keyboard, mouse.
I'm thinking of buying from these people: https://laptopwithlinux.com/ they seem highly rated.

[GrahamPlatt]

You need to specify your budget before you can have any meaningful replies.
And as Geoff100 asked, what’s it for?

[Infrasonic]

If you need it for gaming/video editing or photo post production kind of work the PC will need strong graphics performance i.e a decent graphics card on a PCIe slot with 4/8/16 PCIe lanes on an X16 slot - don't assume the presence of an X16 slot means it has 16 PCIe lanes, you'd need to look at the detailed specs to work that out.

If it's a general use PC without the need for high end graphics then an Intel i3/5/7 or Ryzen equivalent CPU with integrated graphics will do fine.
I'd get 16GB of RAM as a minimum these days, just for flexibility (Virtual Machines/containers et al) and future proofing.

Get a couple of SSD's, that way you can dual boot different OS' (e.g. Windows/Linux) without running into boot overwrite issues when Windows updates and breaks dual boot off of one drive...