Within the framework of the article, we will provide recommended products according to the criteria “good, cheap” for the needs of online learning, watching online videos, and easy to upgrade later if needed. Hopefully, it will be a basis for parents as well as students to refer to.
Table of Contents
CPU: Intel Pentium Gold G6400
As usual, the Microprocessor is always the thing that many people invest in the most, but with the need to just study online, parents do not need to spend too much money on this component. With only office applications such as Microsoft’s Office suite or Zoom for video calling, the G6400 is more than enough to handle all the basic tasks of an online student.
Notably, the iGPU (integrated VGA) equipped on the Pentium Gold G6400 also has quite good performance. If there is no need to buy a separate graphics card, these iGPUs are completely powerful enough to play light configuration games like Esports, or entertainment tasks such as surfing the web, watching Netflix movies, or listening to Youtube music.
Mainboard H410
As Intel’s cheapest motherboard product being sold 100% new in the China market, H410 is an extremely good platform to run cheap CPUs like Pentium and even i3, and i5 (in some models). You can easily find this product for just under $80 produced under famous brands such as Gigabyte, ASUS, or MSi. H410 offers quite good connectivity in its price range with HDMI, USB 3.0, Gigabit LAN, SATA 3.0 ports…etc. more than enough for those new to computers.
8GB RAM
Except for photo/video editing applications that are too RAM-consuming, in 2021, 8GB capacity is still more than enough for users to surf the web, play games, watch movies, study online, or open multiple tasks at the same time.
No longer as expensive as before, RAM prices are currently extremely affordable, so if you need to upgrade later, you can buy a similar stick and install it into the empty RAM slot on the motherboard H410 is easy.
240GB SSD
If there is no need for too much storage, a SATA3 standard solid-state hard drive (SSD) with a minimum capacity of 240GB will be a more reasonable choice than a mechanical hard drive (HDD) with a capacity of 1TB or more. Accordingly, equipping even the cheapest SSD (instead of HDD) will help shorten Windows boot time many times, while opening applications is much smoother.
Computer source capacity 400W
For the system to run stably and with little damage, users should not be too frugal when choosing to buy this component model. If you choose a PSU of poor quality, there is a very high possibility that the components will ‘die unexpectedly’.
For an office PC without a discrete graphics card, users should choose a power supply (PSU) with a capacity of about 400W. With this capacity level, in case the user wants to add a separate graphics card (without additional power) in the future, the PSU can still meet the requirements.