Critique my plan for getting a frugal gaming PC

Dread

Honorable
Jan 10, 2014
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10,510
I want to craft a decent PC but not break the bank at the same time. Here is my blueprint for doing so. I'm not very knowledgeable on hardware so please provide corrections and new ideas wherever needed.

I have an Acer Aspire x3300 and an Acer Aspire x1200. Both have 4 gb of ram each.

I'm going to pay a $99 service fee to migrate parts from both of them into a new mid-tower case. So the new PC would have 8gb of ram and so on and so forth with whatever parts can merge together.

I'm going to buy a new tower, a new PSU, and a new graphics card. I have a 1TB External HD that I can take out of the enclosure and throw into my tower. The ram and processors (?) can hopefully be migrated from the two Acers.


Service fee to migrate parts: 99
Tower: 60
PSU: 100
GPU: 200

Total ~460

For wise computer masters:

- Is this plan wise? Sustainable?
- What's the best graphics card I can get for under $200
- What PSU does that GPU need, and which one should I get?

- Which components can be migrated from my two Acers into the new tower? For instance, if the RAM is both DDR3 and is compatible with the motherboard and whatnot the new PC will have 8 gigs. Both Acer's use an AMD Phenom but I don't know much more than that.

- and for parts that cannot be migrated, what do I need to buy? and how much would it approximately cost? I don't mind buying a motherboard or processor or whatever if it is necessary.
 

DonnyTechMaster

Honorable
Dec 29, 2013
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11,360
Since you aren't buying a new motherboard, I assume you are using one of the motherboards from the previously stated computers. If this is the case, you should be able to have all of the parts moved over smoothly. However, I was not able to find any results online for the computers you described. If you could provide links to them, I would be able to evaluate the situation much better.

As far as the best GPU under $200 I would have to recommend something from the AMD Radeon HD series, sense they are relatively inexpensive, and have a decent amount of performance.

Here is a link to a good Radeon HD GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150641

I have this GPU personally and it works very well.