Office PCs for a small charity

M

Macshimidh

New member
Hello all,

Looking for some general advice, am building 4 pcs for a charity which I volunteer for,
told 'em I could do it for about £200-250 each (peripherals from old pcs are ok)
so no gaming required, just need something which will batter spreadsheets to death :)

First thoughts:

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/amd-llano-home-office/00kW5cWM8a/

Any glaring flaws? The ssd is new to me, seems a decent deal, reliability is more critical than speed here.
theres a bottleneck with the motherboard, it seems to me?

Thanks for your help,

Duncan
 
keynes

keynes

Multiverse Poster
Hi Duncan,
4gb memory ram + a standard HDD should do, to benefit from an SSD you would need a motherboard that supports Sata 6gb/s, but an SSD is not essential.
 
Yamikotai

Yamikotai

Expert
Drop the RAM to 1600MHz, you'll get little benefit from 1866Mhz for office+spreadsheet use. 4GB will also likely be plenty for these uses, and if it's not you can easily add more if needed. I would've said 1333MHz but the 1600MHz is only a quid more

Since budget is an issue, get them without a DVD drive (unless it's explicitly needed) and get a single external DVD drive for the (probably) rare cases when you'll need to use one.
 
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Rack

Rack

Enthusiast
Surely dropping to the 1333mhz would be better still as there will not be any noticeable difference.
 
W

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
How big are the spreadsheets that you are going to be creating/editing, if they are over 500mb each then 8GB RAM would definitely be a good idea
 
M

Macshimidh

New member
Hi all, thanks for the advice so far, very helpful.

I think the only areas where I have gone above the minimum spec, its becaus the price difference seemed negligible,
8GB RAM seems a good idea because they arent very PC savvy, so I can see them leaving lots of apps open at once.

I did a quick Intel quote for comparison:

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/intel-home-office-pc/uUErnPn7R9/

Any thoughts on which of these is better value?

The only thing which is making me edgy is the hard drive, not comfortable with the non-branded drive. Thoughts?
 
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K

Karnor00

Bright Spark
Bear in mind that the build you have selected doesn't include Windows or MS Office. If you already have copies of these then thats fine, just make sure that those copies aren't tied to their existing computers.

There are free operating systems (e.g. linux) and spreadsheet software available, but you need to have a bit more knowhow in order to set these up.
 
M

Macshimidh

New member
Yamikotai said:
It won't actually be unbranded, it just means it could be any brand. They list the WD ones as a separate option as you're paying the name, mostly.
Click to expand...

Aha thanks for that, hadn't worked that one out.

Karnor00 - I've got them onto Microsoft's volume licensing, so they have multiple win7 licences thay can use.

hmm... hard to stop tinkering, this looks like a belter of a workhorse for £250:

http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/quotes/amd-llano/NdQUYKqnXG/
 
K

Karnor00

Bright Spark
You might want to consider upgrading the processor to an a6-3650 for £7 more as it is quite a bit quicker (about 50% quicker). Although if it is literally just for spreadsheets then you probably won't notice the difference (unless they are very large spreadsheets).
 
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