Question Recommended upgrades for an Acer Aspire T TC-865-NESelecti5OPT?

[MisterLilBig]

It's this one : https://www.newegg.com/acer-aspire-t-tc-865-neselecti5opt-student-home-office/p/N82E16883101688

It only has one RAM stick, so I should get another. Which one tho? Any 8GB 2666 DDR4 should be fine?

One thing I noticed is that the motherboard uses a 4 pin connector from the 300W max PSU, does that just ruin the possibilities of getting an SSD and a low budget GPU?

Seems to have 1 Red Connector, SATA(?) available. And I assume the M.2 connectors are being used by the Optane and Wi-fi sticks.

Purpose is mostly towards programming/development, having "too many" tabs and programs open and loading files quicker, the GPU would be a bonus.

Edit: Parts would be bought from the USA online, places like Newegg or Amazon.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was insanely curious if anyone ever bought one of those "NESelect" i5-8400 PCs. They were a very good price. Though, reading the Newegg reviews, sounds like they had issues with the PSUs and HDDs.

I'm disappointed, but not really surprised, to find out that the PSU inside has a proprietary 4-pin connector to the mobo.

Based on that, and probably that there's just one single wire, for +3.3V, +5V, +12V, and GND, that that precludes adding like a GTX 1050 ti 4GB or a GTX 1650 4GB (that don't require PCI-E power connectors). I think that, along with the CPU power demands on +12V, would be too much current on one wire from the PSU, regardless of the PSU's overall wattage ratings on the label.

Sorry.

I would probably suggest, if you NEED to upgrade it for your usages, to instead, back up your data and important info onto a portable HDD, do a Windows Reset (Clear Personal Data - Factory Reset), and then sell that one off, whole, to someone else with meager needs, and do a custom-build for yourself, probably something like an AM4/Ryzen-platform, maybe with a 2400G/3400G, or a 3600 CPU or 3500(X) CPU, if available in your portion of the world, and then a GTX 1650 Super, or an RX 5500 XT 8GB GPU, and 32GB of DDR4, and an NVMe SSD.

Edit: If doing that, just isn't feasible, then consider replacing the optane module with a "real" NVMe SSD, 512GB or larger. I think that would pep it up a bit. As far as video cards, I would do more research from actual owners and people that have tested cards in them, to see if they burned out their PSUs within months of adding a discrete card. (Or if Acer even suggests/recommends any particular GPUs to install, or wattage limits for them.)

 

[MisterLilBig]

Yeah, it was great for a few months and then something happened with the HDD which had to be replaced but since then it has been pretty good.

Alright, GPU is out of the question.

I should get the RAM tho? Any recommendations?

So, NVMe SSD is the best but I would have to get rid of the Optane, is a SATA SSD not gonna be worthwhile with my Optane and HDD?

I would like to not build anything yet. I had a build a few years ago and never got to figure out what went wrong with it, and instead of buying parts to check/test what was wrong with it, I ended up grabbing this machine instead. Hoping to get 18-24 more months out of this!