Legit Reviews

Im trying to pick out a new pc for the old man. He's currently running a Pentium 4 Dell XPS. I upgraded his ram to 3gb and video card to handle his 2 widescreen monitors.

The sub $1000 budget is decent considering he doesnt need a crazy dedicated gpu, i think the current 9800gt is fine.

He needs it to be prebuilt so Im looking at Dell Inspirons and Levenos.

I think any 3.0ghz+ i5 would be enough but i think an i7 would be better in his mind. And ill get at least 8gb ram.

His applications; outlook, occasional basic photoshop, quark, and some youtube type videos.
It should be a good system for 6+ yrs.

So my question: Inspiron i5-4460 (6M cache, 3.4) vs Lenevo i5-6500 Processor (6M Cache,3.60 GHz) vs XPS i5-6400(6M Cache, up to 3.3 GHz)

based on your old mans budget i'd go for the xps and upgrade to the i7 6700 as its currently $150 off at $849 and that comes with a gt 730 built in which is 50% faster than the built in intel hd 530 igpu. while the 9800gt is faster gaiming than the 730, its the 730's ability to process data faster that works better for photo/video editing due to the higher clock speeds.

Check out this Newegg Refurb Deal! The price is hard to beat at $462 shipped with no tax in some states plus you get a Core i7-4790 processor and 12GB of memory. Should be able to toss in the 9800 GT if you want to and since he's not gaming the 300W PSU should be able to handle the card. The NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT has a maximum power draw of 105 W and a suggested 400W PSU. Doing light photoshop and things like that shouldn't put the CPU and GPU at full load to draw 400W.

Core i7-4790 TDP - 84W
GeForce GTX 980 Max - 105W

That is only 189W, so you have 111W of wiggle room for the other system components.

Intel Core i7-4790 3.6GHz CPU w/ 8MB cache
1TB Hard Drive
12GB DDR3 Memory
Intel HD Graphics 4600 (HDMI/VGA outputs on motherboard)
DVD±RW Optical Drive
Built-in SD memory card reader
300W PSU
Keyboard/Mouse
Windows 10 Home (64-bit)