I need a new desktop machine. Does anyone have any opinions?
I am tired of this 10 year old dinosaur. It wasn't a strong machine when new. I am thinking about having a new machine put together. AMD has some new parts that appear quite capable at a fraction of the cost of an Intel part. I am not a gamer. I need advice.
2017-08-27T21:50:37Z
If anyone is interested - on 25 August, I purchased a new machine. It is built around an AMD Threadripper 1950X and an Asus ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard. I loaded it up with all the other bells and whistles including an AMD W9100 GPU (as I am not a gamer). The gentleman at the store who helped me said that I would probably not ever have to buy another machine (as I am almost 60). Crikey, this thing cooks with gas!
Anonymous2017-08-23T00:36:31Z
Favorite Answer
Yeah well 9 years ago I built the PC Im using. It has a Core i7 920 and it still never bogs down. I paid $289.99 for the CPU and the rest of the system was $900. I remember when I went to Frys to buy the parts, I was split between the Core i7 and a Core 2 Duo or Quad CPU. The salesman said the i7 was better for the future and he was right.
The only thing you have to worry about is hitting the point of diminished returns. This is going too far overkilling it. Sooner or later 8gb of RAM wont be enough to cut it and quad core processors will meet the same fate.
If you build or buy a cheap machine, it wont last as long. Yeah, you can build a PC with a Pentium g4560 but how long would it be useful? At the least you could upgrade the CPU and RAM and that will sometimes breathe new life into your PC.
AMD processors have more cores and more overall processing power than Intel's processors. You could buy a quad core or a hexa core and upgrade the CPU later when it gets too slow. You will have to buy a dedicated graphics card with a Ryzen processor because Ryzen processors have no iGPU.
AMD processors give you more cores but Intel processors have better single core performance.
You don't need the latest processors, or a ton of memory, or a superfast GPU to have a good performing machine. I would suggest getting any machine with the following specifications (non-gaming):
(1) 8GB to 16GB of RAM. Going for more won't get you much better performance. DDR3 or DDR4 are the current standards, the one you need is determined by your choice of processors. (2) quad-core or quad-thread processor, or higher. Quad-core is the minimum you need these days for good responsiveness. There are processors with as many as 16-cores or 32-threads, but you will never need that many. (3) 3.0GHz+ processor speed if it's a desktop, about 2.4GHz+ processor if it's a laptop. (4) SSD, almost any SSD will make a night and day difference to the overall performance of the system. Suggest having a 120GB+ SSD and pair it with a 1TB+ HDD, it makes for the best combination of speed and storage capacity.
For a non-gaming PC, you don't need a separate GPU, the integrated GPU is more than good enough.