Home/Office PC build

[Himiko]

Budget (including currency): Up to 1500€

Country: France

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Daily usage, no games or particular tools, mostly browsers, images/photos/text transfer.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Blank slate.

A monitor would be needed, preferably 22.

Also looking for an external storage SSD, one that allows to view what's on it when you plug it. (Some might have an interface or something so as to be user friendly ?)

No need to worry about keyboard/mouse/audio.

 

Hello, so, a bit of disclaimer : This PC is for my mother, who is now 60+. She'd use it daily, and 8/10+ hours per day, mostly to view and transfer photos/images, work on some excel/gimp and some text applications, as well as browsing.

 

Thanks for reading. I really have no idea what a non gaming pc would use.

 

 

[Himiko]

Just a little bump, see if anyone's got an idea.

[jamie.three]

I would recommend getting a lenovo thinkpad laptop second hand (with at least 500GB of storage, 16GB of RAM and intel 8th gen or newer) for example a thinkpad T480. They are very reliable laptops, and all come with SSDs as standard so they are very responsive. You can usually buy them for about 250€ or less and then you dont also have to buy a seperate monitor or keyboard since its a laptop.

For an external SSD you could get something like a crucial X6 (500GB would probably be large enough, images and photos are usually in the region of 5MB each so you could fit about 100.000 of them on a 500GB SSD)

[Himiko]

1 hour ago, jamie.three said:

I would recommend getting a lenovo thinkpad laptop second hand (with at least 500GB of storage, 16GB of RAM and intel 8th gen or newer) for example a thinkpad T480. They are very reliable laptops, and all come with SSDs as standard so they are very responsive. You can usually buy them for about 250€ or less and then you dont also have to buy a seperate monitor or keyboard since its a laptop.

For an external SSD you could get something like a crucial X6 (500GB would probably be large enough, images and photos are usually in the region of 5MB each so you could fit about 100.000 of them on a 500GB SSD)

Unfortunately won't do. She already has a laptop too. She also has quite the collection of files and has reached over 500g already. My guess is that she wants to make herself a "gift" that will last and have hardware that she can easily switch whenever one is dying.

[jamie.three]

2 minutes ago, Himiko said:

Unfortunately won't do. She already has a laptop too. She also has quite the collection of files and has reached over 500g already. My guess is that she wants to make herself a "gift" that will last and have hardware that she can easily switch whenever one is dying.

I did initially put together a desktop PC build as an answer but there really isnt any need for a more powerful processor than what you could find in a Thinkpad, and for the price you would be better off sticking with a laptop and then just replacing it every ~5years (most thinkpads last more than 5 years before getting too slow, I have one from 2016 thats still going strong) If her current laptop is fairly new then there is a high chance that it has another m.2 slot that you could just put up to a 4TB SSD in for plenty of extra storage.

 

For the use you have described you wont see any difference in performance once you get past a resonably fast 4 core CPU with 16GB of RAM and a NVME SSD. you could build somethink like this: https://fr.pcpartpicker.com/list/DBt7bK but i think that would be a waste of money when you can just add up to another 4TB of storage to either her current laptop, or buy a Thinkpad such as a T490 or T14 with a m.2 2280 slot and just upgrade the storage to up to 4TB of fast NVME storage.

 

Alternatively you can get some very large external hard drives or SSDs (although i think a hard drive would be fine for just storing photos) any extrenal storage will appear in file explorer next to the internal storage, they cant really have any kind of interface other than that.

Something like this might be a good option for the external storage https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B07X41PWTY?tag=pcp09-21&linkCode=ogi&th=1

 

You could also consider setting up a NAS server which can be set up to appear in her laptop as if it was just internal storage, and has the advantage that you can set it up with drive redundancy so that there is no chance of data loss. alternatively renting some cloud storage is an equally good option with no set up required. Im guessing that a drive faliure at the moment would be devistating so backing up all of those files is probably something you need to consider.

[Himiko]

Thanks, I'll speak to her again. I'll take your recommendations and see what she says.

 

Thanks mate.

[brob]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-12500 3 GHz 6-Core Processor  (€256.49 @ Amazon France) 
CPU Cooler: Deepcool GAMMAXX 400 V2 64.5 CFM CPU Cooler  (€36.76 @ Amazon France) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B760M DS3H DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  (€124.88 @ Alternate) 
Memory: TEAMGROUP T-Force Vulcan Z 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (€95.88 @ Alternate) 
Storage: ADATA XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  (€142.88 @ Alternate) 
Case: Asus Prime AP201 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  (€95.93 @ Amazon France) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic CORE GM 500 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply  (€75.94 @ TopAchat) 
Monitor: Dell S2721DS 27.0" 2560 x 1440 75 Hz Monitor  (€250.49 @ Amazon France) 
External Storage: Crucial X6 4 TB External SSD  (€282.49 @ Amazon France) 
Total: €1361.74
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-01-11 16:22 CET+0100