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building new office workstations, platform input please

M

Manaknight

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 6, 2005
Messages
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as the title states, i was asked to update our remaining non updated legal assistants and paralegals pc's at this time. I was able to get in on some nice ssd deals, and i have case/dvd drive/ram/and psu on their way in.

I know these will get ragged on fairly well but nothing otuside of what you expect from an office environment, giant outlook pst files, some video and audio of client evidence etc. They are coming off s478 p4 2.8 units with around 1.5gb of ram and a 40gb ide drive. I'm figuring it won't take much to impress.

I have a few systems from previous upgrades getting doled out, a few are older core2duo e8400 machines, and a few are phenom II x4 955 units.

I'm leaning towards the 965 or 1045t units at microcenter, but i wasn't certain if there was a better option at current. I lean towards amd because that would bring me into a single hardware image and am3+ at least will have a little bit of room to grow. I was tempted to try the apu, but i can't help but think they don't need anything more than integrated video or at works a 20 dollar discrete deal.

am i looking at this right? or am i missing something in this thought process? I Know intel is the better platform overall, but usually we talk about it for gaming, i can't see the cpu being a bottleneck in anything that would be done here in the office.
 
Yeah would definitely be looking at AMD for this one. There was a nice deal on a 120GB Samsung SSD today on Slickdeals. Llano would be worth looking at probably, or a Pentium + whatever setup. You're gonna wanna try to save money with motherboards. I would just tally up what a Pentium G620 + discrete + mobo would cost over Llano + MB. That's all you need to do, really. Llano would probably be more fun.

[edit]
Yeah the cheapest Llano and cheapest decent FM1 will run you around $100, whereas a G620 + Mobo is about the same, $10-15 bucks more or so.. but you'd still have to buy your discrete.

Obviously finding a discrete to match the Llano's wont be that hard, but it will inflate the price. I would just use 30fps 1080p decode as the performance threshold to be shooting for. All said and done the G620 setup would probably cost around 30 bucks more or so, but you'd get a lot more for your money in terms of CPU and most likely video. Thing is, if they don't need it and would rather have the extra money then... ? But you said they were coming off a socket 478 setup.. wow, talk about ancient. Looks like they like to keep their things around a while... I'd go with the G620, sadly.
 
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In this case, since you live near a Microcenter and therefore can take advantage of the AMD CPU + mobo deals, grab the Phenom II 965T plus the Biostar A880GZ motherboard for $150 give or take. The Phenoms have better single threaded performance than the FX CPUs, which is a lot of office related apps, and that Biostar is the better choice out one of three mobos listed in Microcenter flyer that have onboard video.
 
ended up getting my budget bumped a little so i went with the sandy bridge i5 2400 and a 1155 b75 board.

my goal was 4 ram slots for future mem increases and incorporated video from the sandy bridge chip to avoid needing discrete for non power users.

thanks for the input! I was fully set to do the amd setup, and will continue to use those combo deals for other projects around the office.
 
just as an update here is how these thing spec'd out
i5 2400
biostar b75mu3+
4gb crucial ballistix ddr3 1600
mix of samsung 830 ssd and kingston v200+ 120gb ssd's
rosewill blackbone case
antec vp 450w
dvd burner

i don't think that is too bad all things considered, I will probably add discrete cards to the one or two people that do encoding and photoshop (besides myself, i'll just move my discrete from the system on my desk).

thanks for the suggestions everyone, if i have to fill in any more holes i'll probably go the microcenter amd route for one offs, esp since i already have a build image on the amd platform.
 
Are they on dual screens or singles? Just curious as I just switched ~70 employees to dual monitor setups and I was thanking whoever the last IT guy was that picked up newer boards with dual onboard video outs.
 
saedrin said:
Are they on dual screens or singles? Just curious as I just switched ~70 employees to dual monitor setups and I was thanking whoever the last IT guy was that picked up newer boards with dual onboard video outs.
Click to expand...


single for now but has multiple outputs on the motherboard, we have a few on upgraded monitors but the place seems to prefer to going to a larger single than multi's

i have a dual setup on my desk, but i'm also running a gtx460
 
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