Desktop tower or All-In-One?

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

We need 3 new PCs for our office, should I go with a desktop tower, or an All-in-one? 

The users will be using it for simple tasks like Word, Excel, browsing ......

 

I have these two in mind -   -

Tower -  https://new.hpshopping.in/catalog/product/view/id/1641/s/hp-desktop-260-a102in-y0n18aa-1/category/4/

AiO - https://new.hpshopping.in/desktops/hp-all-in-one-20-c029in-v8q65aa-1.html 

 

Oh and will this hardware be able to handle the task mentioned before? 

 

Thanks!

[Mr.Meerkat]

Those PC really aren't great but I suspect you guys are probably on quite a tight budget so I guess it will do the trick? I mean it will do word and browsing fine however I can see it possibly struggling on larger excel documents, especially those ones with lots of calculations. 

Anyway, how much would a monitor cost? I guess just go with whatever is the cheapest as they are basically identical in specs...

 

I guess if you'd like the desks to be less cluttered then an AIO would probably be more ideal however if easy maintenance and upgradablilty (both in terms of changing the machines to fixing/upgrading the current machines)  is important, the tower would probably be the better option. 

 

Hope this is somewhat helpful  

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

1 minute ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Those PC really aren't great but I suspect you guys are probably on quite a tight budget so I guess it will do the trick? I mean it will do word and browsing fine however I can see it possibly struggling on larger excel documents, especially those ones with lots of calculations. 

Anyway, how much would a monitor cost? I guess just go with whatever is the cheapest as they are basically identical in specs...

 

I guess if you'd like the desks to be less cluttered then an AIO would probably be more ideal however if easy maintenance and upgradablilty (both in terms of changing the machines to fixing/upgrading the current machines)  is important, the tower would probably be the better option. 

 

Hope this is somewhat helpful  

Thanks! Would an i3 be better than a Celeron in our case? I mean is the price difference worth it? 

https://new.hpshopping.in/catalog/product/view/id/1620/s/hp-pavilion-desktop-570-p054in-z8h68aa-1/category/4/

[AccordingOne]

How much you are looking to spend ? Price in USD would help. Allso, tell us where are you from, so we know where you'll end up buying (prices and availableness may differ )
How often your employes will use them ?? All the time? 24/7 ? or not ? 
Does storage capacity matters or it's going to be working with some NAS or something simillar anyway ? 

I lately bought Lenovo Ideacenter 510 for simmilar purposes, it was cheaper, it also came with an SSD. So if you're not HP only, try to reconsider it.

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 minutes ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

Thanks! Would an i3 be better than a Celeron in our case? I mean is the price difference worth it? 

https://new.hpshopping.in/catalog/product/view/id/1620/s/hp-pavilion-desktop-570-p054in-z8h68aa-1/category/4/

In a way I'd say the i3 would probably be a little overkill...

 

I guess the problem is the Pentiums in those machines are 6.5 Watt TDP parts meaning the're just really overclocked tablet chips (which is also highlighted by the fact that they're braswell chips, not Haswell/Skylake/Kabylake). This means that overall, the pentiums are about half as quick as the i3 when all cores/threads are utilised but are 1/4 the speed during single core operations which is typically what desktop/basic productivity work involves. 

(source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2784&cmp[]=2924 )

 

I guess, what you really want is a machine with what all older pentium/celeron would have been, an i3 without hyperthreading and lower clocks (and some instructions/cache missing). In other words, if possible, try and find a machine with Intel Celeron/Pentiums that are Gxxx (such as the celeron G3930) as they will be cheaper than the i3 but will be around 50% more powerful than that Pentium Jxxx CPU overall and 2.25~ times more powerful in single core tasks. 

 

Just now, AccordingOne said:

Allso, tell us where are you from, so we know where you'll end up buying

Is the HP website being in INR not a big enough clue?  

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

7 hours ago, AccordingOne said:

How much you are looking to spend ? Price in USD would help. Allso, tell us where are you from, so we know where you'll end up buying (prices and availableness may differ )
How often your employes will use them ?? All the time? 24/7 ? or not ? 
Does storage capacity matters or it's going to be working with some NAS or something simillar anyway ? 

I lately bought Lenovo Ideacenter 510 for simmilar purposes, it was cheaper, it also came with an SSD. So if you're not HP only, try to reconsider it.

We don't have a fixed budget but not looking to spend over ₹35,000 per PC. The employees will use them around 10-12 hours a day, all our data is in the cloud so storage isn't a problem. And I think the Ideacentre is overkill for our work load? 

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

7 hours ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

In a way I'd say the i3 would probably be a little overkill...

 

I guess the problem is the Pentiums in those machines are 6.5 Watt TDP parts meaning the're just really overclocked tablet chips (which is also highlighted by the fact that they're braswell chips, not Haswell/Skylake/Kabylake). This means that overall, the pentiums are about half as quick as the i3 when all cores/threads are utilised but are 1/4 the speed during single core operations which is typically what desktop/basic productivity work involves. 

(source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2784&cmp[]=2924 )

 

I guess, what you really want is a machine with what all older pentium/celeron would have been, an i3 without hyperthreading and lower clocks (and some instructions/cache missing). In other words, if possible, try and find a machine with Intel Celeron/Pentiums that are Gxxx (such as the celeron G3930) as they will be cheaper than the i3 but will be around 50% more powerful than that Pentium Jxxx CPU overall and 2.25~ times more powerful in single core tasks. 

 

Is the HP website being in INR not a big enough clue?  

 

7 hours ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

In a way I'd say the i3 would probably be a little overkill...

 

I guess the problem is the Pentiums in those machines are 6.5 Watt TDP parts meaning the're just really overclocked tablet chips (which is also highlighted by the fact that they're braswell chips, not Haswell/Skylake/Kabylake). This means that overall, the pentiums are about half as quick as the i3 when all cores/threads are utilised but are 1/4 the speed during single core operations which is typically what desktop/basic productivity work involves. 

(source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2784&cmp[]=2924 )

 

I guess, what you really want is a machine with what all older pentium/celeron would have been, an i3 without hyperthreading and lower clocks (and some instructions/cache missing). In other words, if possible, try and find a machine with Intel Celeron/Pentiums that are Gxxx (such as the celeron G3930) as they will be cheaper than the i3 but will be around 50% more powerful than that Pentium Jxxx CPU overall and 2.25~ times more powerful in single core tasks. 

 

Is the HP website being in INR not a big enough clue?  

Well guys, I found this for the same price - https://new.hpshopping.in/desktops/hp-slimline-desktop-260-p020il-w2t12aa-1.html

 

I can buy a copy of OEM Windows 10 and install it right?

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

@Mr.Meerkat @AccordingOne

 

Oh and I just wanted to ask, is building, a bad idea? If so, I just want to know why.

[Mr.Meerkat]

11 hours ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

Well guys, I found this for the same price - https://new.hpshopping.in/desktops/hp-slimline-desktop-260-p020il-w2t12aa-1.html

 

I can buy a copy of OEM Windows 10 and install it right?

Yep, that would be perfect  

 

And yes, you could just buy an OEM key for windows 10 and it will work perfectly fine. 

 

1 hour ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

@Mr.Meerkat @AccordingOne

 

Oh and I just wanted to ask, is building, a bad idea? If so, I just want to know why.

Well generally for businesses, its not the best idea due to support and what not but I guess it depends on the business whether its a good idea or not. 

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

On ‎19‎-‎08‎-‎2017 at 5:57 PM, Mr.Meerkat said:

Yep, that would be perfect  

 

And yes, you could just buy an OEM key for windows 10 and it will work perfectly fine. 

 

Well generally for businesses, its not the best idea due to support and what not but I guess it depends on the business whether its a good idea or not. 

Just wondering, is the Pentium N3700 a bad choice for our use case? I was thinking about the NUC. 

[Mr.Meerkat]

9 minutes ago, Vishvas Sudarshan said:

Just wondering, is the Pentium N3700 a bad choice for our use case? I was thinking about the NUC. 

Again, its a braswell part meaning that its really not ideal, even for lighter use case scenarios. 

 

However, if its considerably cheaper than the other machines (especially that cheaper i3 one) then it could work. 

[Vishvas Sudarshan]

18 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Again, its a braswell part meaning that its really not ideal, even for lighter use case scenarios. 

 

However, if its considerably cheaper than the other machines (especially that cheaper i3 one) then it could work. 

Okay, will the i3 one perform  better (Edit: Significantly better) than the - NUC with an SSD?

(If adding an SSD to the NUC makes sense). 

Cause the NUC with everything installed will be around $75 cheaper than the i3 with an OS.