Home/Office PC upgrade – will old and new play nicely together?

[Gabriel T]

Hi. I need to upgrade my current PC which I built in 2012. Upgrade because current CPU and mobo won’t accommodate Windows 11. Need to do it now because of CPU water cooler failure. Could replace the cooler but it’s an obvious opportunity to get on with the job. (For my work I don’t need a water cooler but it seemed fun at the time! I didn’t realise that they are less long lasting than a simple stock cooler).

Budget: good to keep it down but not critical, will pay for reliability and everything working quietly and with minimal lag.
Main workload: MS Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Also emails and web browsing. I often have several apps open at once and as many as 10 or so web tabs going, so it’s fairly intensive home/office type use.
Secondary workload: A bit of sound editing using Audacity. One HDD acts as backup for my music server files. I also dual-boot Windows and Linux Mint. I use Linux really just for fun, bits of programming etc. I’m not into gaming and so don’t need overclocking.

I want to upgrade as soon as possible, preferably next week! I’ll be shopping for parts in the U.K.

I’d like to keep as much as possible from my current PC, so…..

The stuff I’m planning to keep:
Current case (and fans) – Nexus Prominent 5 Premium Case
PSU – Nexus-6300 630W 15.5dB
Optical drive – Samsung Internal DVD RW
HDDs, SSDs – 2 X 3.5” HDD (1TB, 4TB) and 2 X 2.5” SSD (120GB, 240GB) – All SATA II
Monitor – Dell U2414H
Logitech keyboard and Evoluent mouse.
I just use 0n-board sound and graphics, so no separate cards.

The stuff I’m planning to buy:
Motherboard – Gigabyte Z690 UD AX (replaces Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H-WB WIFI)
CPU (comes with stock cooler I believe) – Intel Core i5-12600 (replaces Intel Core i5-3570K)
RAM – Corsair Vengeance 16 GB (1 x 16 GB) DDR5-5200 CL40 (Replaces 8GB DDR3)

So, will all this play nicely and reliably together? Is there any way to do it better? The bit I’m anticipating difficulty with is getting the OS and programmes (especially Acronis backup) to transfer happily, but that’s another story.

Many thanks for help and advice.

 

[Jerry James]

So, will all this play nicely and reliably together?

Yep, you shouldn't have an issue with this mix of hardware from a compatibility POV.

That said, using slow, low-capacity SATA II SSDs might become a bottleneck at certain points. I'd recommend grabbing a faster modern SSD as your primary driver as you'll have an M.2 NVMe slot on that motherboard.

PS. I'm not too sure about the case and PSU though, because I haven't really heard the Nexus name in nearly a decade