Spec for the wife's new desktop?
Posted: November 7th, 2019, 2:37 pm
Apologies in advance for the intermittently recurring theme, but my poor head is swimming.
The wife's trusty Acer desktop turns ten years old in January, and this seems like as good a time as any to replace it, what with Black Friday coming up and all. But the welter of choices about processors and suchlike is a bit oppressive.
She does a lot of fancy stuff with Photoshop, but otherwise her needs are quite basic, and I'm not looking to budget more than £400 or so. She isn't fussed about wifi capability, because she'll be cabled directly into the hub. She's managed perfectly well with 500 gigs of hard drive for the last decade, and a terabyte (which seems to be standard these days) would be more than adequate (and I can always bung in a second drive, if not.) She probably ought to have 8 gigs of ram, and I'd be looking for DDR4, but the cost of upgrading a new machine from 4 to 8 is so minimal that it won't be a factor in my choice.
But..... I get properly tangled up when it comes to processors. My own computer has an Intel i5 CPU at 7400, but I have no idea whether she needs anything that chunky. My understanding is that the i3 is still capable of doing most things, but that it has fewer cores, which apparently means it's likely to be slower and less good at multitasking (or something like that?)
The web seems to think that all AMD processors except for the latest Ryzen are a bit pants, and that they use more juice and emit more heat. (Allegedly. Can anybody comment on that?)
And that it will hardly matter which processor she has if I put in an SSD, or get a machine that already has one. Which, according to this forum, is a doddle. I suppose I'll need to piggyback the drives with a cable if I do it myself? And how vulnerable are SSDs to SDS? (Sudden Death Syndrome.)
You see, neither of us wants to be continually fixing or upgrading stuff. We'd rather her machine was running on traditional lines if it's likely to be more reliable. You see where I'm coming from?
Currently looking at Acers and Dells, which have served us well over the years, but other thoughts very welcome.
Enough. Thanks!
BJ
The wife's trusty Acer desktop turns ten years old in January, and this seems like as good a time as any to replace it, what with Black Friday coming up and all. But the welter of choices about processors and suchlike is a bit oppressive.
She does a lot of fancy stuff with Photoshop, but otherwise her needs are quite basic, and I'm not looking to budget more than £400 or so. She isn't fussed about wifi capability, because she'll be cabled directly into the hub. She's managed perfectly well with 500 gigs of hard drive for the last decade, and a terabyte (which seems to be standard these days) would be more than adequate (and I can always bung in a second drive, if not.) She probably ought to have 8 gigs of ram, and I'd be looking for DDR4, but the cost of upgrading a new machine from 4 to 8 is so minimal that it won't be a factor in my choice.
But..... I get properly tangled up when it comes to processors. My own computer has an Intel i5 CPU at 7400, but I have no idea whether she needs anything that chunky. My understanding is that the i3 is still capable of doing most things, but that it has fewer cores, which apparently means it's likely to be slower and less good at multitasking (or something like that?)
The web seems to think that all AMD processors except for the latest Ryzen are a bit pants, and that they use more juice and emit more heat. (Allegedly. Can anybody comment on that?)
And that it will hardly matter which processor she has if I put in an SSD, or get a machine that already has one. Which, according to this forum, is a doddle. I suppose I'll need to piggyback the drives with a cable if I do it myself? And how vulnerable are SSDs to SDS? (Sudden Death Syndrome.)
You see, neither of us wants to be continually fixing or upgrading stuff. We'd rather her machine was running on traditional lines if it's likely to be more reliable. You see where I'm coming from?
Currently looking at Acers and Dells, which have served us well over the years, but other thoughts very welcome.
Enough. Thanks!
BJ