Intel486dx33 wrote on 2026-10-04, 12:21:

Hi guys, I Am still looking for the best budget computer that Supports windows-11 ? […]
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Hi guys,
I Am still looking for the best budget computer that
Supports windows-11 ?

But I want a computer that is more power efficient too.
I will probably have to go with a mini computer ?

I want allot of ssd local storage, ram, and windows-11 support .

If you're on a budget, your only real option is to scrounge used/surplus computers and parts or just buy stuff here and there, when it's on sale or you can find a good deal on whatever in particular. As far as the tiny PCs go, the only budget friendly options are barebones and older models that are being cleared out for the newer stuff. ASRock has a line of "Mini PCs" called DeskMini that come in barebones and pre-configured options, so that's a good place to start, as they have a few generations of those and tons of them are out in reseller channels.

Best budget system, low power, topped to the gills with RAM and local SSD storage while in the middle of a global shortage on both with sky high prices.

You first need to figure out what your use case is. And why do you need large amounts of storage and RAM?

If you aren't gaming a used 1L office PC like the HP ProDesk 600 line might meet your needs. I would stick with G8 or newer. You can get those for ~$150 and they will blow away a processor that so old it doesn't support Windows 11. Office PCs are made to be serviceable and usually have a single screw that's commonly a captive thumb screw which then lets you slide open the case exposing RAM and NVME slots you can configure to your heart's content. They run almost silent and sip power while being roughly the size of what looks like an audio interface of some sort on top of that tower.

Win 11 until build 25398 runs even on a Turion X2 from 2006, after build 26xxx it requires something a bit younger, but still runs on HW way older than a decade.

Win 10 on his side will probably be supported for most of 2030s.

Win 7 x64 has the last update in Jan 2026, win 8.x x64 will get its last update in the next November

So if you need an excuse to burn some money on a new PC, you have to look elsewhere.

Well the system you have supports the Haswell and Broadwell generations.

It of course depends on how much you want to spend, or can spend on it.

£300-£450 can get you a Alder lake or Raptor lake based mini computer.
many of the minis are coming off lease now. They usually come with at least 8Gb and most Ive seen 16Gb of RAM and a 256Gb NVMe SSD.

If you aint gaming on it then £300 buys you more than enough these days and given the Z440 it will feel like a night and day upgrade.

Guys,
When I see these YouTube videos about Macs and not being able to fix or
upgrade them I am glad I am using a PC.

Yes,
my hardware might be dated and not the fastest or energy saving but it works.
I have all licensed software and programs because Microsoft license keys
Are cheap today. Network printers too don’t require internet or subscription
Services to work.
And my computers run flawlessly , dependable , reliable , and resilient.
Best computers I have ever owned for the price.

I put my home network and computers together long ago in 2003.
I have a cat-5 Ethernet home network thats not the fastest
But it’s very reliable, inexpensive, and easy to fix,
it never goes down or gives me any problems

It’s more reliable than AT&T fiber and Cable modem networks.

So yeah, my stuff is old but it works.

I am just waiting for prices to come down so I can upgrade everything.
I want to do a complete overhaul of my entire home ecosystem .

Or do I ?

I don’t know if I want my house run by A.I. computers and subscription services ?

It's highly unlikely prices will return to what they have been in the first half of 2025. Nvidia controls the GPU market, and AMD is only happy to follow suit. Those Nvidia GPUs also aren't getting more power efficient with all the AI capability they're reportedly getting stuffed with. If HBM demand crashes overnight it's anyone's guess what happens then. You probably won't be getting RAM at 500% then, but it'd be surprised if it'll be lower than, say, double the Q2 2025 prices. SSDs? No idea. HDDs? I stopped looking at those prices, too depressing.

You picked the worst time to upgrade... in living memory, I think.

such wrote on 2026-10-04, 17:31:

It's highly unlikely prices will return to what they have been in the first half of 2025. Nvidia controls the GPU market, and AMD is only happy to follow suit. Those Nvidia GPUs also aren't getting more power efficient with all the AI capability they're reportedly getting stuffed with. If HBM demand crashes overnight it's anyone's guess what happens then. You probably won't be getting RAM at 500% then, but it'd be surprised if it'll be lower than, say, double the Q2 2025 prices. SSDs? No idea. HDDs? I stopped looking at those prices, too depressing.

You picked the worst time to upgrade... in living memory, I think.

SanDisk and SK Hynix just released a new open standard they are calling HBF. It stacks 8 or 16 NAND dies. HBM can hit either 3.35TB/s or 4.8TB/s for HBM3E while HBF tops out at 3TB/s. But you could have a smaller amount of HBM paired with 512MB of HMF that holds the model.

A Chinese DRAM factory has also started selling competitive chips. Currently they are only in the Chinese market, but even if they are never sold outside of that. That means less demand/pressure for Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron memory.

Prices are higher, but there are still decent bargains to be had on used hardware. You can safely look five years back and have tons of choices. Sadly I don't believe AI demand will be dropping anytime soon. The insane increase in coding I'm seeing, as well as the AI created videos which are continuing to only get better means it's never going to go away. The genie is out of the bottle, and ready to create you anything you imagine.

Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700k or i7-9700 or higher.

https://ebay.io/m/fjr6QU

The i7-8700k ones or newer should have the front intake fan so they have enough cooling for a good video card. The ones with the K CPUs also have a much better CPU cooler than the lower end CPUs.

I have one set up for my son that i upgraded the power supply and installed a 2080TI.

Plays everything just fine.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-10-05, 01:59:

Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700k or i7-9700 or higher.

Do you really call going from 6th to 8/9th gen a worth upgrade?

If I was going to buy older Intel hardware, I wouldn't touch anything older than the 11th-generation (Rocket Lake/Tiger Lake), which is the oldest Intel hardware that one can really "get by with", because it's got the bases covered for what is considered "current bottom line" for basic usage. Anything older than that and you'll start to run into issues and compromises, depending on the design and capabilities of the desktop. The two 8th-gen Intel desktops I have are barely usable and are only usable because I fully-loaded them with RAM and decent Nvidia GPUs for the time, both of which are showing their age. Right now, I'm about to attempt to get more out of them by swapping the old GeForce cards with the new Intel ARC GPUs, so I'll let you guys know if that works out as an option for future use.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-10-05, 03:00:

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-10-05, 01:59:

Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700k or i7-9700 or higher.

Do you really call going from 6th to 8/9th gen a worth upgrade?

Yes, Windows 11 officially supports them and we have had 0 issues with being able to run anything he wants to run.

I would recommend any Win10 or 11 machine to have at least 32GB of RAM if you are doing anything other than just very basic things.

My current best laptop is still only 9th gen, but I do have some newer ones with smaller screens and lesser video cards.

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-10-05, 08:27:

Yes, Windows 11 officially supports them

I would recommend any Win10 or 11 machine to have at least 32GB of RAM

Oh, come on! 32GB? O_0

My home server has 8GB it runs A WSL1 machine to run one instance of tvheadend, + one other instance of tvheadend that does real time trascoding from (H265 to H264 and /or Mpeg2) which runs either in a VMw/HV/VBox VM or a WSL2 machine + a Windows server install that acts as a Domain Controller and as a RemoteFX VDI server.

At the same time it is also connected to my big screen TV and runs WMC, Mediaportal (server and client) , Kodi, and TVmosaic (server only).

All using a quad core N100 limited by design to 6W, but running normally @15W TDP.

And does all of that no matter if I boot Server 2025, Server 2024, any W10 build or Linux (with a different VM scheme obviously), w/o a sweat, and W/O a swap file.

Using efficiently what you have if part of the fun, at least for anyone who prefers to like keeping the neurons spinning more than burning money "just because".

if you are doing anything other than just very basic things.

My current best laptop is still only 9th gen, but I do have some newer ones with smaller screens and lesser video cards.

Anything past Sandy bridge is more than enough to do most of a normal user, and most power users need.

Isn't that the point, the point is that from gen 6 to gen 8 or 9 there isn't a worth jump in performance.

Gen 6/7/8/9 are all worth upgrades, but if you're coming from something much slower, like core duos

Yes, 32GB seems an excessive demand. I have an Ivy Bridge based T430s laptop with 8GB of RAM running Win10 22H2.
It is quite snappy. I don't know what qualifies for 'very basic things'. I don't do any programming on that system, but office, multimedia, web browsing - no issues with any of these.

It so happens that all my Win11 machines do have 32GB of RAM, but could probably do well enough with less.

dr_st wrote on 2026-10-05, 09:40:

Yes, 32GB seems an excessive demand. I have an Ivy Bridge based T430s laptop with 8GB of RAM running Win10 22H2.
It is quite snappy. I don't know what qualifies for 'very basic things'. I don't do any programming on that system, but office, multimedia, web browsing - no issues with any of these.

It so happens that all my Win11 machines do have 32GB of RAM, but could probably do well enough with less.

The basic requirement of the OS are practically unchanged since Vista. It's about 600MB for 32bit systems and about 1GB for 64Bit ones.

Everything past the above values, are additional services and bloatware, starting from Defender and other similar crap.

In short 2GB are more than enough to run a 64bit system itself (w/o disabling anything useful, and defender isn't in that category), the additional 2/6/10/14 GB of ram are there to be used, by memory demanding things VMs first, then modern browsers, then games. No matter if we are talking of Win11 LTSC/ Win10 LTSB/LTSC down to Vista

I have a netbook think it's the atom N450 in it, had a Win7 key, so almost for a laugh I let it update to Windows 10, was sometime around 2016 I think. Only had 1GB installed at that point. To my absolute amazement, it went off without a hitch and it was snappier and felt like it had more RAM useable than Win7, could browse with 4 tabs open. The RAM compression was working it's ass off I think, but even with such a shitty atom, it didn't seem to kill performance noticeably. So since it was actually useable, I stuck the max of 2GB into it (Single slot DDR2) and it seemed better than even WinXP did on these machines. At that point in time, it could run Netflix and Prime Video with silverlight codecs really smoothly. No "catches" in watching stuff on it, apart from screen size. Then again, a dothan class 1.6ghz machine was also doing okay with those at that point. Anyway, a year or two later, updates happened all round, chrome, edge, Win10 and Netflix and Prime, and it became a dog. Even old shows in SD were stalling every few seconds. Think it was 2019 update that did it in, XPSP3 for Win10 kind of thing. Anyway, single cores under 2.5Ghz, probably don't want 10 these days. I think there's 2 years more of security in Win7 than what you'd have to lock 10 down to, and 7 smooths out on 1.5GB+.

Anyway, seems like you can do a lot on 8GB still, even if modern games require more. Even with price hikes, 4GB modules in any of the still serviceable flavours seem to come up at cheaper per GB prices, so with a 4 slot board you are up to 16.

End of the day it's down to use case. High end gaming? It's gonna be pricey. Just general desktop usage like web browsing, watching YouTube/NetFlix/etc? Video editing or 3D rendering? AI development?

If just desktop you don't need much. I wouldn't go below Zen 2 on the AMD side, but the IPC boost with Zen 3 is worth it and prices are normally identical. Intel I'd get at least 8000 series.

I'd consider 8GB to be the bare minimum, you can run with less, but it won't be a good experience. I had a low power Intel 7th gen i5 that had 4GB of soldered RAM and that thing crawled. 16GB will meet the needs of most users unless you are running a bunch of VMs or something.

It also comes down to habits. There are people who run Chrome and keep several hundred tabs open all the time.

But another issue that could come up is the needed specs for Windows 12 if there's a minimum cutoff for NPU Tops supported by the hardware. It might not make sense to upgrade now just to run into the issue of Windows 11 going out of support and needing to upgrade yet again.

SScorpio wrote on 2026-10-05, 13:25:

End of the day it's down to use case.

^ This.

Unfortunately the OP hasn't provided any details on what they actually use their PC for, so it's difficult to make any informed recommendations on what they might need.

I'm getting by on a Haswell system with 32GB DDR3 RAM. It works fine for me since I don't play any modern games. No way I'm upgrading any time soon.

Apparently you can give Win11 the 98Lite treatment...
https://wccftech.com/windows-11-lightweight-u … emoval-16gb-ram
Sounding like you'd get as much unused RAM on 4GB as on post 22H2 Win10 with 8GB.