Computer: Personal computers for business tasks rarely become objects of colorful advertising and reviews by top bloggers, but nevertheless they occupy a very significant share of the computer equipment market, which means that a significant number of users need instructions on how to choose a computer for the office. Today we will talk about how to choose the most reliable and less whimsical components to maintain, because it is these features that, as a rule, are of interest to buyers of such equipment.
Processor and RAM
Assembling a machine for absolutely any purpose begins with the selection of these elements. If in the case of a home gaming computer the principle the more expensive the better often applies, then for an office PC the price / quality ratio, convenience in everyday use, and the durability of the assembled kit come to the fore. If your company’s tasks are not related to high-tech areas that require serious computing power, then it is unlikely that buying an Intel Core i7-based processor, and even more so the incredibly expensive Intel Core i9, will be a rational waste of money.
If the equipment is needed to perform very primitive tasks like checking almost and accepting orders, then you can limit yourself to the very budgetary dual-core Celeron and Pentium CPUs, and they have a common base with “cores” and can also boast Skylake or Kaby Lake technologies.
If the tasks are not so simple, and employees often have to act in multitasking mode, then it makes sense to purchase a faster processor, i3 and i5 can handle serious calculations in Excel or work in engineering software, but graphic artists or data analysts still need to have under the hood is a modern quad-core Core i7.
With RAM, everything is extremely simple – the quantity here certainly goes into the quality of the system, and therefore if the budget for the purchase of equipment is not too severely limited, it is better to take a little more with a future perspective. If you plan to install the latest version of Windows on your work machines, then it simply does not make sense to buy less than 4 gigabytes, and for full-fledged multitasking with resource-intensive applications, it is desirable to have 8-16 GB. Now you can get best advice about Best Mini PC at Apcsilmic.
HDD
If you do not take into account server technology, then a standard office PC, as a rule, does not have large requirements for storage space – it is unlikely that it will have a collection of videos and music for hundreds of gigabytes. If the computer is used exclusively for working in office programs like Word, Excel or PowerPoint, then hundreds of gigabytes will be enough for it to store all working documents, which means there is a considerable temptation to use a not very capacious, but extremely fast SSD.
For resource-intensive tasks, the speed of which the results of work largely depend on, it also makes sense to purchase a solid-state drive, but we must remember that models with a terabyte of memory and above cost very serious money, which means the price of the machine will increase by several hundred dollars.
It’s worth mentioning optical drives, which are a thing of the past with the advent of broadband Internet on home PCs, but for business purposes some companies still prefer to use CDs and DVDs, so it makes sense to equip a computer with such a device. They are not expensive, which means that such a purchase is unlikely to drastically affect the overall estimate in 2019.
Graphic arts Computer
When assembling a computer for games, this item is the most important, but for office equipment, on the contrary, it goes to the end of the list. Most business computers have integrated graphics, meaning the graphics card is built into the processor itself. If you do not play modern 3D games, and the workstation does not involve such use, then this solution should be enough.
If the work is related to graphic software, architectural design and similar areas of activity, then most likely you will need a discrete card, but at the moment, due to the incredible hype around top cards, it is almost impossible to make a profitable purchase of a good board – cryptocurrency mining has raised their prices to heaven.
If you decide to buy equipment of compact or ultra-thin form factors for your office, then an integrated card will in any case be the only option available to you – modern components have very considerable dimensions.
Upgrade potential
Even if you decide that you will get by with integrated graphics or a single modest SSD, it would be nice to be able to add the missing components if necessary for optimal performance. Even small “minitower” class system blocks provide such an opportunity, having an additional slot for a hard drive and a slot for a video card in the arsenal. The presence of DIMM slots will help to add RAM without replacing the existing one with a more modern one.
All elements require power, and the newer and more powerful the board, the more power it consumes, which means that the power supply plays an important role. If you have equipped your system with a weak unit up to 300 W, then even having the financial ability to insert a video card, you will not be able to do this, because it simply does not have enough power. Expert advice on choosing the right battery varies, but if you’re not sure what features a particular PC will carry in 1-2 years, it’s best to have some margin of safety.