Instead of buying memory and add in cards for the old Acer, invest your money in a better board.
I just retired a board that overclocked to 3.8gbs, but it had a 2 core D950 Intel in it. I had 1 pcie slot filled with a video card, but I needed 3 screens so my other video was AGP. There was literally no more slots and everything was overclocked. I bought a SATA drive that was SATA 3 running 1.5gbs. I then acquired a junker from a neighbor that threw it in the trash. It was an HP 580t with a missing Hard drive. It had 5 PCIe slots so I filled them up with left over cards I have laying around. They only thing I had to buy was a $23 SATA 3 card that runs at 6gbs. The other thing is a video card to get my 3 screens. I then transferred my 6 hard drives into the HP. Having filled this machine, I discovered the sound was messed up that I eventually fixed. Now for less than $100 in cards, I have a decent machine( for the kind of work I do) and have moved on from my old box.
You might surprise yourself what is for sale on ebay instead of fretting over trying to dress up a box with a soldered in CPU. The people that toss around words like Rysen 7, 32 gb of memory and Nvidea 3000 something are gamers that inherited their money. They are the same people that toss the old machine and buy a new one so someone like you and me can render video and write emails and read FR.Many machines today don't even have a DVD in them.
Well...
Basically all my wife needs to do is have MS Word running, maybe Irfanview, and several browsing windows (not more than 1 running vids at a time.)
And not have the machine take a full minute to open another browser window... Or take 5 minutes to boot up. (That’s what’s happening on her old Dell machine despite all my efforts to clean it up. The plan is to get her going with this machine, then use Win 10’s “fresh start” function to reinstall itself minus any gunk, in the Dell, stick a SSD in it (it is already maxed out at 4 GB RAM), and see if it’s good enough for my daughter to do homework and such on. If not, we might try Linux in the Dell for kicks.
The ACER is in fact brand new (but slightly “old stock”, as I’d stashed it until I could get around to working with it. The intention was always to at least add a SSD & likely some RAM.) I’m typing on it right now, so, as a test, ATTM I have 9 browser windows open, 2 playing vids, and a WordPad window going, plus the machine is downloading Windows updates. The last You Tube vid window took ~2 seconds to open. This is without the SSD in yet, and running 4 GB of RAM.
I conclude the CPU is not complete junk (gamers would surely disagree) and with a SSD and 4 GB of RAM most people noted some improvement — so I think we can get what we need with the mods discussed. I figured I didn’t want to spend over $100 on mods (the machine only cost me $65 on clearance!) The RAM if I only add another 4 GB only cost me $23 and the SSD was $29 (Black Friday). If I stick in a full 16 GB of RAM it’d be $45 for that, IIRC. (I’m losing track of my Black Friday deals without looking at receipts.) (I’ve for now stuck the 16 GB in my HP laptop, which frees up 2x 4 GB sticks from the HP.) I just need to know how best to get the DVD player / writer in this Acer going nicely after that 2nd SATA connection is tied up with a HD.
And, it’d be useful to know if RAM over 8 GB would likely improve the life of the SSD.
Maybe someone knows...
At this point I have 2x of 4 GB of laptop RAM and 3 SSD’s looking for a home.
Not that I disagree with you about eBay. I have 3 HP business desktops with i3 or i5 processors in them, all upgraded with SSD’s, and my HP8460 laptop now has the 16 GB of RAM and a SSD. All were eBay purchases.