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New Pc Build
insanejosh
Member Posts: 26
in Hardware
Hello,
I have been out of the loop on building a PC for about a year. I am looking to build a work desktop for the office, it will not be used for gaming. Any ideas on what I should be getting? I could go either AMD or Intel. Computer will be basically used for word documents and creating estimates.
Thanks!
Comments
the real question you need to answer for yourself is whether you have any specialty applications that have unique hardware requirements. If you just want to run Microsoft Office or Open Office, than pretty much any Intel I5 system or AMD equivalent from Best Buy (or other local vendor) will do the job. If your estimate software has a specific requirement than that will drive your need. Since you specifically said you weren't building for gaming, the old hardware requirement most likely won't apply.... these days, its pretty much high end gaming that requires "state of the art" hardware.
My advice is to step back and even consider whether it is still worth your time to build a machine...
I know... I know... before those of you in the community lob those stones,,,, remember that he said he waw doing word documents and billing estimates.....
If you REALLY mean to use it for business software and not gaming,,, buying a prebuilt system on sale may be a better, simplier, cheaper, option.. ( be sure to get the warranty: its a deductible business expense..)
building isn't really cheaper,,, we (gamers) almost always opt to get much better platforms for about the same price... that is the ones who don't just go whole hog and best the best, newest, available hardware, this week: because they can....
I have a life, its just different from yours.....
For word documents and MS office type programs you can build but wont need to. It may be easier and just as cheap to buy a prebuilt on sale at bestbuy or walmart.
Dont get me wrong, building one will net you a better PC for the money spent. But what your talking about doing a $200 emachine could do.
If you want to build then state your budget and we can pick components easily enough.
Here is one at wal mart that will do office work all day long for $131 dollars.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Pre-Owned-Refurbished-Black-GX520-Desktop-PC-with-Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-2GB-Memory-160GB-Hard-Drive-and-Windows-7-Home-Premium-Monitor-N/20678958
Not great, but for typing a word or excel document, checking emails, ect. it would work and is cheap.
You definitely need to evaluate any other requirements you may have. Needing a PC to run a document editor is like needing a car that can drive on the highway.
Do you need a laptop for portability? Do you need multiple monitors? Will you be running any other programs which require more performance?
If you're using it for work, then reliability matters. Getting a cheap piece of junk should not be an option. "Saving" $100 up front and then being unable to work for a few days because the computer died is not a good deal.
Probably the most important thing for you is good power delivery. You don't need a lot of wattage on a power supply, but you do need high quality. If your electricity isn't completely pristine where you work, a good UPS can be a worthy investment, too, so that power weirdness never reaches the computer and has a chance to do anything nasty.
Data backup is very, very important. A lot of businesses would go out of business in a hurry if they lost their data. At an absolute minimum, you want daily incremental backups and an off-site backup. Depending on how much data you need, a simple USB drive might be fine, or you might need a NAS capable of holding terabytes of data.
I used to have backups on two USB drives, one at home and one at work, and swap them every week or two. That way, if either my home or my workplace (but not both at once!) completely burned to the ground with all computer equipment in them destroyed and unrecoverable, I wouldn't lose much data that I cared about. Depending on your needs, a cloud backup service may make sense for you.
Depending on your work environment, a good SSD in lieu of a hard drive may make sense for you. If you're loading programs and data locally, an SSD can make a big difference--even for web browsers, e-mail, and other such programs that you'd think of as similarly undemanding. If you're mostly loading things over a network, the SSD doesn't help nearly as much.
If you do a lot of work on a computer, you might want to get multiple monitors. My theory is that the amount of good computer work that a business expects an employee to do is proportional to the number of monitors that he is provided with. If you have multiple programs open a lot, being able to "switch" between them simply by glancing at the other monitor is really, really convenient.
Note that I haven't yet discussed the processor, video card, or memory. That's because those aren't terribly important if you don't have demanding needs. Memory is pretty simple: get two 4 GB modules of DDR3 memory rated at 1.5 V or lower and 1600 MHz or higher.
For a CPU and GPU, get a modern chip with both in the same chip and use the integrated graphics there. It doesn't need to cost a lot to get something that will be plenty nice for your needs. For example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113349
As Quizzical pointed out, a backup plan for your data is important. It seems as if you're trying to keep the budget to a minimum, so Quizzical's suggestions probably won't work unless the business already has them set up. The cheapest route to go would be to back up only your important files on a site like Dropbox. Free storage is easy to find and having it automatically synchronize your data is convenient.
If you need something more complex, robust, or need to be able to access previous versions of files, the time to plan for it is before you buy anything.
If you're just doing normal office work then any computer is fast enough. Invest to a good monitor(s), keyboard and mouse so that it's comfortable and ergonomic to use. That's much more important than performance.
If you can choose, a SSD hard disk would be good purchase. It cuts computer start up time and all loading times easily more than 50%. Otherwise you don't need to care about performance, because all processors, graphic cards, and RAM speeds are more than fast enough for normal office use. When choosing graphic card a slow integrated card is likely better choice than fast and expensive model: the slow models are more than fast enough for all office work, and are usually much quieter.
For Business:
The software matters more than the hardware; it's often more expensive in the first place. The hardware is just a commodity item that enables the software.
Unless your company has enough PCs and staff to have an internal IT/repair department, go with some place with a good warranty program. On-site or in-town repairs are a huge bonus, and can take down time from days to hours.
Hardware is going to break eventually, higher end and quality components mean it will break less often, but it will still break eventually.
Leasing is also a good option to consider, especially if you plan on rotating hardware as it ages or obsolesces. A 3-year lease gives you a good time window to get good use out of a computer before the parts get too old and start having reliability problems due to age, and it's a nice time window because 3 years is a good time for some significant upgrades to have come around.
Virtualizing or thin clients are also a good option - virtualized desktops mean your desktops are hardware agnostic and can run on nearly any computer (PC, Mac, whatever the hardware barely matters), thin clients means your desktops run on a central server and the host computers barely matter. Both will take some performance hits, but if your mainly doing clerical/administrative uses for the computer, the performance isn't a huge consideration, and the ease of management and relaxed hardware requirements may make up for the downsides.
What makes sense for a business depends to a considerable degree on the size of the business. I hope that the original poster isn't coming here asking what to buy when he needs 1000 computers for a sizeable company. I probably should have asked, but I have the impression that he only needs one.
Thin clients seem to be the dream of IT people and the nightmare of those who have to use them. I get that they reduce the cost of providing a "computer" to everyone, but is that really worth it if it reduces the productivity of people using the "computers" by 5%? I'd bet that there are more than a few places where it reduces productivity by more than that. And that's ignoring the hit to employee morale in being asked to constantly fight with a computer that only kind of works.
It depends on your users.
POS/clerical/administrative - it makes pretty good sense. Particularly if your users are the type that are prone to clicking on strange email attachments, not computer saavy in the first place, have a high turnover rate, or have a low entry level of PC training. They may have lower "productivity" because of the degraded capabilities of a thin client, but if that's offset by the fact that your IT staff isn't in there every other day "fixing" what they have broke this time. The loss of 2 persons' productivity (the user who can't use their computer because of something, plus the IT person to go in and fix it, again) - that more than offsets the minor loss of the users productivity in using a thin client in my experience.
If your looking at engineering, really high level stuff, or people who are saavy enough to not wreck their computer on their own (at least often), it doesn't make so much sense. But it's easy to replace a thin client with an issued PC if/when it becomes clear that it presents a significant advantage.
With virtualization, you get kind of the best of both worlds scenario - the user is still in control of their computer, they run it on whatever host machine you want, and you have enough enterprise controls on the VM to be able to do IT admin on it up to and including a complete reprovision on the fly. That option does have the added cost of needing hypervisor licensing though, at least if you want it to work with any kind of performance and back-end support.