Any suggestions for this office PC setup?

[Macusercom]

I'm currently building an office PC for my mother to replace a 6 year old notebook. The primary tasks are Chrome, Office, maybe basic things in GIMP and some software for education and its lifetime is to be expected at about 3 to 5 years. As I will be using some of my old hardware to build it, I only need advice on some of them that are left now. Moreover, some hardware has already been bought.

 

So these are the parts I want to get:

CPU: Intel Core i3 4170 PC1150 3 MB Cache 3,7 GHz retail

PSU: be quiet! System Power 7 300W ATX 2.31 (BN140)

Mainboard: MSI H81M-E34 (7817-058R)

Tower: VS4 - W ATX PC CASE

DVD: LG Electronics GH24NSC0 schwarz

Cooler: ARCTIC Freezer 13

 

Down below I'll make some statements what I thought about the hardware, please feel free to correct it if you think I'm wrong.

 

For the CPU I thought about the i3 as it gives more power than Intel's Celeron which I feel will be limited after a few years. As this will be the only component which processes data (DGPU is unecessary) it should have at least some power. I'm not a friend of AMD, but their CPUs are still considerable, but I'm not into AMD so no idea what would be good. What do you think about Intel's i3 power efficient CPUs? There are no boxed versions and a little bit slower, but are only using 35W

 

The PSU was the cheapest I could find here in Austria which has at least 80 GOLD. Cheaper ones were completely no name, which is not good at all. 300W should definitely be enough for this PC configuration. I expect it to use 150W at max and maybe about 40 to 50W idling.

 

The mainboard was also the cheapest for the 1150 socket with at least 4 USB 3.0 (I think having more than 2 USB 3.0 ports is now essential, even though I know I could add them via PCIe, but I don't know if that's really good (drivers, issues maybe, is there any real difference)? I do think that there has to be 1x 4-pin for the CPU cooler and 2 of at least 3-pin fan connectors for intake and outtake (1 fan won't cool properly in my opinion).

 

Would you say that 1 fan at the front and 1 at the back is enough (12 or 14cm)? 2 at the front would be too much and without one at the back, the airflow is not really good. 3 chassis fans would require a more expensive motherboard (no need I guess?) and MOLEX might be nice, but changing the speed of the fans etc. is more complicated, I prefer to directly connect it to the motherboard.

 

For the DVD drive I just picked the most valuable one. SecurDisk seems not to be a real deal and 2 MB cache instead of 0,5 MB is really neglectable. It will be used for watching DVDs, ripping CDs and installing software for education. Maybe Windows, so used pretty rarely.

 

The CPU cooler is the one I currently have in my gaming rig and even though it's big, it's pretty silent and adds some good cooling power. I'm not seeking to build a silent PC but the fan should be as quiet as possible and will be running at minimum speed 90% of the time (that's what I want). Another question would be if you can operate an i3 with only the heatsink of e.g. the ARCTIC Freezer 13 without the fan? Just interested

 

The tower is a midi-tower indeed, but that is for the ease of installation and for the looks. All mini-towers were pretty ugly and also more expensive than 30 bucks. If you suggest another tower, it should have at least 2 USB 3.0 ports at the front and should look like a box (so flat front, not some weird forehead-like bloated surface).

 

Already there:

SSD: 240 GB Samsung 840 EVO

HDD: 500 GB WD Black

RAM: 2x4 GB 1600MHZ DDR3 Crucial Ballistix Sport

Monitor: BenQ GL2250HM 21,5 Zoll

(+Keyboard/Mouse/Speakers we already have)

[Catman007]

Get Pentium g3258 I got those for my office its so dirty cheap and great performance even on stock

[Prysin]

you might aswell go with an AMD APU.

 

It would give you close to i3 performance, but better graphics power. I am not sure how much "workstation" stuff you can set the iGPU to do. But if you can set the iGPU to accelerate GIMP with openCL, then you gonna see some epic performance.

 

Yes the i3 is a bit faster in day to day tasks, but you'd be counting seconds, not minutes as some people claim.