Seeking advice re: upgrading my ATC-280-UR11 (APU v.s. CPU / GPU, RAM, HDD recommendations?)

HungryFreaksDaddy

Hello all,

The PSU fan in my (~3-year-old) Aspire ATC-280-UR11 has started to make an obnoxious grinding noise. Rather than worrying about fixing that specific issue, I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to replace the old PSU altogether and upgrade several other components (CPU / RAM / GPU), with the hope of improving performance of the "games" (mostly rail simulators) I play. I have never built or even upgraded a PC before, so I'm looking for all of the help that I can get...

I had been using the UserBenchmark site to take a look at potential builds, however, not a single one of the CPUs that it seemed to be recommending me appear to be compatible with my TC-280 board. I am aware that the ATC-280-UR11 comes with an "APU" which, to my understanding, is something like a combined CPU/GPU. I am wondering - does this limit my options for CPU (and/or possibly GPU) upgrades? Again, pardon my ignorance, as I'm in some uncharted territory here.

In short, I suppose if anybody here with a bit more knowledge of the ATC-280-UR11 could assist me in figuring out what sort of CPU (or APU?) upgrades are compatible with this machine, as well as offering any recommendations in terms of GPU, RAM and/or HDD upgrades.

For what it is worth, here are the minimum system requirements for the software I am running (the former is already fairly old):
Trainz: A New Era
Trainz Railroad Simulator 2019

Thank you.

billsey

These are the processors that the Aspire TC-280 shipped with:

Supports the following AMD Kaveri/Richland processors

• AMD A10 A10-7800 FM2 3.5G 2M 1600 65W Kaveri
• AMD A10 A10-6700 FM2 3.7G 4M 1600 65W Richland
• AMD A8 A8-7600 BGA 3.1G 2M 1600 65W Kaveri
  
• AMD A8 A8-6500 BGA 3.5G 4M 1600 65W Richland

You will notice that two of those are BGA (Ball Grid Array) which means they'll be soldered in, so no swap is supported. I believe the UR11 came with a A10-7800, so already at max for what they shipped with. Unofficially and hypothetically the A78 chipset is AM2+. So the best APU/CPU you could upgrade to would be a A10-7890K or the Athlon X4 880K and IMHO they both only offer a modest improvement on your current PC configuration, only offering a small boost to both your CPU core and GPU core clock (Athlon CPU only as it has no integrated GPU). Even if you did upgrade to one of those there is no guarantee your PSU or power delivery on the motherboard would not fail or overheat as the TDP of both of these is higher than your current APU. Better for an upgrade would be to drop a GPU card in, specs say:

• One PCIe x16 graphics card

So you should be good to go on that, as long as you measure the fit and the new PSU has got enough heft. Memory is easier yet, specs say:

• Support DDR3 1.5V and DDR3L 1.35V 1600 SoDIMMs (2GB, 4GB or 8GB) dual channel up to 32GB total memory

You just need to make sure you're using the same spec in each slot, don't try to mix voltages.

So... If it were mine I'd leave the APU alone, drop a more modern AMD card in taking into account the prices on the secondary markets, and go to 16GB of memory, ideally with two 8GB sticks so I could bump to 32GB if I ever decided I needed to do higher end video or image editing.

HungryFreaksDaddy

billsey said:

***snip***

Thank you for the thorough response and the advice regarding the GPU and RAM upgrades.

While I neglected to include this in my OP (and was unable to edit it) I have one remaining concern... The other use I was hoping to get out of my desktop is some 3D modeling in Blender (not for animation purposes, but rather creating models/assets in my train simulators and/or possibly other applications).

Is this APU going to severely limit my options in that regard, or should the upgrades to my graphics and memory be able to overcome that, at least to an extent? If I can squeeze at least 2-3 years of modeling out of this rig, I would consider upgrades (as opposed to a new rig altogether) a worthwhile investment.

billsey

That's a tough call. It depends on whether Blender has any optimization that uses the APU, or if they didn't start doing off loading until after these were on the market. It would be a bit of a moot point if they saw the newer GPU in your system and used it for off loading those types of calcs. You likely are going to want the full bore on memory though, multi-layered high resolution images are about the biggest memory hog there is these days.