# General Business Category > Technology Forum >  new computers

## bones

year started slow but my business is pushing forward
Time to upgrade the office computers. 

need something that is cheap yet powerful 
with very little power consumption to help 
my generator

i like this   





GB-BXi3H-4010 GIGABYTE Brix 4th Gen Intel i3-4010U 1.7GHz Compact PC





nice low cost solution i think

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## Pap_sak

Nice - but looks like you still need memory and a hard drive and an OS - that adds quite a bit to the price.

What about just buying laptops?  Least you get a couple of hours battery life...

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bones (06-Mar-15)

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## bones

> Nice - but looks like you still need memory and a hard drive and an OS - that adds quite a bit to the price.
> 
> What about just buying laptops?  Least you get a couple of hours battery life...


true to get the thing to work will cost me R7500 but so will a normal desktop pc

yes a desktop pc can do more but it is also big and power hungry i got a quote from 
pc store and it is going for R2800 for CPU and board excluding all the goodies with 
all the goodies like os ram and hdd psu and box it hits the R6500 mark and it eats 
more power 

sh_t if i know if it is a better pc or not but for R1000 more you get a small pc 
that can fit in a safe. laptops cook the batteries eventually i had that before 
replacing a single battery can cost R1800 and if something goes wrong no 
replacement parts. same sh_ty deal if you ask me but i need it to fit in a safe

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## julies

What was the specs on the Desktops, was it I3, I5 or I7, does it have a graphics card. Are you comparing the same amount of ram and hard drive sizes. I  cant see how it could be R6500 for the desktops you mentioned. Whats the size of the ram and hard drive you adding to the Compact PC and which operating system are you using.

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## bones

> What was the specs on the Desktops, was it I3, I5 or I7, does it have a graphics card. Are you comparing the same amount of ram and hard drive sizes. I  cant see how it could be R6500 for the desktops you mentioned. Whats the size of the ram and hard drive you adding to the Compact PC and which operating system are you using.


yea made a tiny mistake actually here is the prices from the horses mouth 
piss poor power hungry system nothing really special gpu is onboard 

intel Core i3 4150 3.5 ghz 4th gen R1700.00
120 Gig ssd hard drive R1400.00
8 gb ddr3 1600 mhz ram R1200.00
msi M board R800.00
thermaltake 550W psu R700.00
pc case R700.00
lg dvd/rw R250.00
win 7 home basic 32/64 Bit R1300.00

Total = R8050.00 inc os  
Total = R6750.00 exc os

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## julies

Is there a particular reason why you need 8gig Ram and SSD harddrive as well as such an expensive PC case ?

Can you not reuse the Licence of your old computers.

For something similar to your specs except with a 500gig Hybrid Harddrive, I get about R7000 each including the OS.

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## bones

> Is there a particular reason why you need 8gig Ram and SSD harddrive as well as such an expensive PC case ?
> 
> Can you not reuse the Licence of your old computers.
> 
> For something similar to your specs except with a 500gig Hybrid Harddrive, I get about R7000 each including the OS.


ram is a must os is a must the case was not my idea 
at all but the apparently it is for better cooling i would 
mount it on a block-o-wood i seriously dont care it 
just needs to work as i understand it the ram is 
shared between os and onboard gpu so it needs to be 
a lot as a gpu pci-e thing cost a sh_t load more

also again not my idea but ssd is apparently a lot more 
reliable and faster then the old hard drives especially 
because i plan to move it from safe to office and back 
to safe again. my license is xp home and new software 
like coral draw is not willing or able to work with it and is 
partly why i need the f_cking upgrade to begin with  

but i am told any i3 4th gen with onboard gpu and 
8gb or ram can handle coral draw so that small pc 
looks just as good as the big one

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## Chrisjan B

I won't take an SSD when still running XP as the OS does not support the TRIM feature SSD use. It will shorten the lifespan of the SSD.
That said it is money well spent IMHO - especially when you run the SSD as boot drive with Windows and programs on it and your data on a normal hard drive. You need only a 120GB SSD for this and it gives sapce for expansion.

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## bones

> I won't take an SSD when still running XP as the OS does not support the TRIM feature SSD use. It will shorten the lifespan of the SSD.
> That said it is money well spent IMHO - especially when you run the SSD as boot drive with Windows and programs on it and your data on a normal hard drive. You need only a 120GB SSD for this and it gives sapce for expansion.


windows 8.1 is not optional right now i need it because 
the programs i use dont support xp anymore... but what 
do you think would you go for the brix? "i3" one?

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## IanF

Hi Bones
We use coreldraw as our main design programme and acrobat professional as our customer support programme. We have quad core i5 processors 3.1 GHZ and 8GB of RAM.
I was also looking at replacing our desktop with the Intel Nuc because of power. I then did a meter reading and instead of 400 watts (the PSU size) the computer the draw was 220w with 2 screens a router and adsl modem. So check your actual power usage before buying a new computer. I bought this monitor.
For speed I bought hybrid drives and they did not make a difference, so the next step is SSD drives and more RAM.

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bones (10-Mar-15)

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## Chrisjan B

IanF - did you measure the power usage with PC under load? Will be interesting to see the difference between idle and load....

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## IanF

Yup was under load opening big files over the network and send them for printing.

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bones (10-Mar-15), Chrisjan B (11-Mar-15)

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## bones

> Hi Bones
> We use coreldraw as our main design programme and acrobat professional as our customer support programme. We have quad core i5 processors 3.1 GHZ and 8GB of RAM.
> I was also looking at replacing our desktop with the Intel Nuc because of power. I then did a meter reading and instead of 400 watts (the PSU size) the computer the draw was 220w with 2 screens a router and adsl modem. So check your actual power usage before buying a new computer. I bought this monitor.
> For speed I bought hybrid drives and they did not make a difference, so the next step is SSD drives and more RAM.


i like that "Efergy monitoring socket" i think i saw something 
like that at our local builders 

waiting for a quote on a amd system with water cooling 
also 8gb of ram and all the rest it is a apu system they 
are really inexpensive and house a hell of a lot of 
processing power i was told it will work with a 350watt
psu and i use samsung monitors with the power brick

but i do need a single intel system for special software 
that has no amd driver support for some stupid reason
it is the only reason why i need intel and because it 
will only do the 1 process it doesnt need to be big 
i3 will work but 8gb ram is a must i have written to 
the software suppler about amd support or any other 
alternative all i got was thank you for your e-mail bs 

thanks for the tip will get myself this monitor device 
knowing true power use for us is a must

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## bones

ok more on the intel driver this software actually use the 
cpu directly so it needs a driver downloadable from intel 
that will allow almost direct access to the cpu dont ask 
me why i cannot tell you but that is what the software 
wants that is what i need and no there is no alternative
software available and the older version is no longer 
supported so i am forced to look at a i3 system and it 
sucks also there is no amd alternative why i dont know 
but i need what i need or my ship sinks

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## IanF

Bones
If you want top of the range computers look at the supernova If you have to ask the price you can't afford it. The guys who do the truck wraps use these.
If the software works and needs Intel then you have your answer.

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bones (11-Mar-15)

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## bones

> Bones
> If you want top of the range computers look at the supernova If you have to ask the price you can't afford it. The guys who do the truck wraps use these.
> If the software works and needs Intel then you have your answer.


that supernova is just total power would love to own one 

here is what my budged allows for at the moment 
home & office PCs have a look at the amd quad Core pc

only other extra is win 8.1 i need 2 win 8.1

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## IanF

This is like buying a car we always want what we can't afford.

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## irneb

Those NUCs do seem "decent" ... until you see what you need to add to them to make them work. Then the cost is very close to a normal PC, if not more. If you're worried about the power consumption, have a test on a normal PC - you'd be surprised by how little the PC itself actually uses. It's only when you add something like a high performance graphics card or overclocked an i7 (together with the added cooling needed) that you see high power consumption on the PC itself.

The other issue is that they may have a decent CPU and moderate graphics (i.e. the built-in Intel graphics), but you don't have lots of space for any sort of HDD. So you're stuck with a 2.5" disc, which means it's very difficult (or expensive) to get something faster than a 5400RPM. Either that or you need to go with an SSD, again a lot more expensive size-for-size.

All that said, you mention Corel Draw and Photo Shop ... it should work decently on 8GB. Depending on the size of the documents you're working on, PS (especially) uses lots of hard disc swapping - so if going that route a SSD would be highly recommended. To me however, an absolute minimum of 16GB is required (the file I've just opened in Revit is using 12GB before I've even started editing it) - so that puts those NUCs basically below par for me.

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## bones

> Those NUCs do seem "decent" ... until you see what you need to add to them to make them work. Then the cost is very close to a normal PC, if not more. If you're worried about the power consumption, have a test on a normal PC - you'd be surprised by how little the PC itself actually uses. It's only when you add something like a high performance graphics card or overclocked an i7 (together with the added cooling needed) that you see high power consumption on the PC itself.
> 
> The other issue is that they may have a decent CPU and moderate graphics (i.e. the built-in Intel graphics), but you don't have lots of space for any sort of HDD. So you're stuck with a 2.5" disc, which means it's very difficult (or expensive) to get something faster than a 5400RPM. Either that or you need to go with an SSD, again a lot more expensive size-for-size.
> 
> All that said, you mention Corel Draw and Photo Shop ... it should work decently on 8GB. Depending on the size of the documents you're working on, PS (especially) uses lots of hard disc swapping - so if going that route a SSD would be highly recommended. To me however, an absolute minimum of 16GB is required (the file I've just opened in Revit is using 12GB before I've even started editing it) - so that puts those NUCs basically below par for me.


what supper weapon do you use?

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## irneb

> what supper weapon do you use?


In the office I'm given an old Dell Pressision T5500 (32GB 1600GHz RAM, 2 off Xeon X5650 CPUs making 2x6 core = 12 cores hyperthreaded = 24 effective cores, 1TB 7500 RPM hdd, Geforce GTX 560 Ti). Still plenty good enough, especially on 3d rendering due to the CPU. Though I don't agree with their choices here - too expensive for too little performance.

At home I've not spent that R40k+ on a PC. Rather I went with something in the range of R12k to R14k a few years ago (around 3): i7-2600, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Geforce (something or other). On editing the home PC is faster than the office PC due mostly because of the CPU's GHz being 3.8 GHz there while the office's only does 2.67GHz. But anything where multi-threading is used the office one outperforms it around twice. Though open/close and any sort of disc access makes my home's SSD show its stuff. And anything which uses more than the 16GB RAM means my home PC slows to a crawl, even with the SSD.

For Revit the GPU isn't much used, though still not so as you can do away with it. The built-in Intel Graphics is a bit too slow, but the speed increase between a mid-range Geforce and a top-of-the-line Quadro isn't easy to see. On something like 3d Studio though that changes quite a bit, but for those we have 3d presentation workstations instead.

At the moment our office is attempting to reduce some costs on new workstations, not to mention allowing "work" from outside over PCoIP. They're actually going the other route: One humongous VM "server" with multiple concurrent users on old / cheap as ground / 2nd hand PCs/Laptops (i.e. a real "cloud" instead of the BS where it's just remote storage like Dropbox, actually showing how "cloud" is just a marketing term - this is much the same setup as those dumb-terminals linking to mainframes in the 50s and 60s). We're using a VMWare Horizon View server on a machine like the following: 4x Xeon E5-2687W CPUs, 128GB RAM, 2TB worth of SSD RAID, nVidia Grid K220Q graphics. Since around the end of last year we've been testing this with about 8 concurrent users, each getting a Win7-64bit pro in a remote VM with resources shared equally. Performs around the same as my home PC, though if any sort of internet connection you do see some lag between moving a mouse and the cursor updating (fractions of seconds though), over the LAN there's no perception of lag. We've had lots of teething issues like connection dropping and freezing, but for the past month it's been about on par with a normal workstation's robustness.

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## bones

that is a big system 

i got a second hand 6 core amd
system with 8gb or ram and ati 
gpu build in it runs like a bat out 
of hell very happy with it thankful 
that i paid nearly nothing for it

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## Kola

On my the notebooks fully good variant. And not expensive.

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## David McG

I wrote about this entry level point a while back but look if budget is a factor the laptop is the best bang for your buck, you can get a full system for a similar price and the plus side is that tower system can be upgraded and then there are these NUCs / SFF systems which lack the upgrade ability but still come without a monitor and keyboard.
you can get a full laptop for the same price which is a fairly decent internet machine.

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