itX build - help spec system

[ik9000]

Some rellies are after a new machine - "nothing fancy, as small as possible without compromising performance, long-lasting, must be responsive" (they were on Vista and their machine was chronically laggy+slow hence that last comment)

Uses: office, internet, no significant gaming ("does chess count?" ). Some (basic) photo editing in elements and music stuff in Sibellius etc.

Must have win7pro OEM. Doesn't want 8 or 10. Would get retail licence but they no longer exist.

They would keep existing monitor and peripherals.

Current machine is some sort of Dell. Can, if necessary re-use sata DVD drive and 5.25" multi- card reader + sata HDD if needs be but allow for all-out replacement for now. Existing CPU is old S775 C2Duo probably not worth keeping. RAM=DDR2. GPU is rubbish. Doubt it would beat modern on-board so binning it.

Don't usually build at this level - what CPU/APU has best on board graphics and processing ability combo? Is this one of the places where AMD APUs should be considered rather than intel?

Should we look at Brix system or BYO?

Any suggested build lists?

[Ulti]

Option 1: Intel NUC
Is budget a major concern? I got my parents an Intel NUC and it's been great for just Office, internet and streaming videos. If you need to use the DVD and multi-card reader though then it could be an issue. I mainly went for it due to form and also because I got a good deal. Checking back at my receipts it was £125 for the Intel DC3217BY NUC which is basically an i3-3217U with the motherboard, case and power supply. The only thing I did need to buy separately was RAM (£15 for 4GB), an mSATA SSD (£46 for 120GB back then), a power cable (£2) and a USB hub (£2) along with the OS. However, I'm not sure if there are currently any good deals on the Intel NUCs or similar machines.
Intel NUC BOXNUC5i3RYH - i3 5010U (£224.99 @ Scan)
Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXI3H-5010 - i3 5010U (£215.15 @ CCL Computers)
Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXA8G-8890- A8-5557M (£169.99 @ CCL Computers)
Note that these only have 4x USB Ports, HDMI and an audio jack, nothing else. You will need to add a 2.5" HDD and RAM (8GB DDR3 SODIMM £29.49 @ Amazon).


Option 2: Refurbished Office Machines
If you're on a really tight budget then maybe look at refurbished office machines. I found this HP Elite 8200 with an i3-2120, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD RW Drive, Windows 7 for £99.99.

Option 3: Self Build
If you don't mind the size and just want greater flexibility/upgradability then maybe something like: PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD A8-7600 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor (£64.45 @ CCL Computers)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-HD2 Micro ATX FM2+ Motherboard (£33.91 @ CCL Computers)
Memory: Patriot Signature 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£27.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Xigmatek Aeos MicroATX Mid Tower Case (£22.08 @ CCL Computers)
Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply (£29.94 @ CCL Computers)
Total: £178.37
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-06 18:09 GMT+0000

Decent bare mATX build. Just add some storage and OS. Not sure how loud AMD's latest stock fans are now though so maybe need another £15-20 for a cooler although I imagine they'd rather save that money and bare with the noise.

[ik9000]

Size is the cruncher, then cost, and ideally low noise. It sits on a desk in their dining room and the current mini-ATX is too large and noisy for their liking. The need for an optical drive is a problem, but they are prepared to have external drive if it makes the thing noticeably smaller overall. (and they would then have a portable drive to take with a laptop too)

[Ulti]

Yeah at home we just have 1 external disk drive to share between us although the last time any of us used it was months ago. I do however use my USB card reader a lot though as there doesn't seem to be a simple way to link my camera to my PC yet.

Do you think they'd be interested in going smaller like ITX? Although ITX would cost a lot more.

Option 4a: Self Build Mini-ITX (No DVD Drive)
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD A8-7600 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor (£64.45 @ CCL Computers)
Memory: Patriot Signature 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£27.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply (£29.94 @ CCL Computers)
Other: Powercool Qube (£21.35 @ CCL Computers)
Other: MSI A68HI FM2+ ITX Motherboard (£54.62 @ Dabs)
Total: £198.35
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-06 19:17 GMT+0000

Option 4b: Self Build Mini-ITX (Even smaller with DVD Drive bay)
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD A8-7600 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor (£64.45 @ CCL Computers)
Memory: Patriot Signature 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£27.99 @ Amazon UK)
Other: MSI A68HI FM2+ ITX Motherboard (£54.62 @ Dabs)
Other: Thermaltake SD101 Case + 180W PSU (£79.98 @Ebuyer)
Total: £227.04
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-06 19:19 GMT+0000

Just a selection of sizes with their relative price, dimensions and volume.

Case	Price	W (mm)	H (mm)	D (mm)	Volume (L)
mATX Cases
Gigabyte GZ-MA02	£13.09 (CCL Computers)	173	365	365	23.0
Xigmatek Aeos	£22.08 (CCL Computers)	170	387	396	26.1
Fractal Design Core 1000	£29.99 (CCL Computers)	175	355	420	26.1
Zalman T4 V2	£14.99 (Scan	189	427.5	364	29.4
Antec P50	£39.99 (CCL Computers)	260	355	355	32.8
Corsair Carbide 88R	£39.99 (CCL Computers)	198	378	440	37.2
BitFenix Nova	£22.78 (CCL Computers)	183	437	465	37.2
mITX Cases
Antec ISK110 (w/90W PSU - No DVD)	£60.13 (Scan)	79	222	212	3.7
Thermaltake SD101 (w/180W PSU)	£79.98 (Ebuyer)	119	264	261	8.2
Powercool Qube (No DVD)	£21.35 (CCL Computers)	200	257	215	11.1
Lian Li PC-Q07B	£43.16 (CCL Computers)	193	280	208	11.2
Intel NUCs
Intel NUC BOXNUC5i3RYH	£224.99 @ Scan	115	48.7	111	0.6
Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXI3H-5010	£215.15 @ CCL Computers	108	47	114	0.6
Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXA8G-8890	169.99 @ CCL Computers	128	59.6	115	0.6

The Antec ISK110 is really tiny as you can see but the 90W PSU is a bit too low if running the A8 at 65W. You can run it on 45W mode safely though for decent performance! Again, you sacrifice the DVD drive though but the difference between the Thermaltake SD101 is enough to buy an external DVD RW. I'm not sure the stock cooler will fit in the tiny Antec ISK110 though so you may need to buy a slimmer cooler.

I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with choices but I know not everyone wants to just follow one method. I would say the refurbished option is the cheapest and will simply work and requires no real building. It's not too big at 100mm x 338mm x 379mm - 12.8L either. However means no real warranty. Building an mATX build gives the best value for money out of these options and allows for easy upgrades down the line but it is rather big compared to the other options. Going smaller to an mITX with the same parts doesn't cost too much more but you may have power issues although I reckon you'll be fine. I had the Antec ISK100 before with a first gen A6-3500 (65W) for a while and it was fine.

On a last note though, I would personally pick the Gigabyte BRIX GB-BXA8G-8890- A8-5557M (£169.99 @ CCL Computers) option as it seems to offer decent performance for the price whilst remaining tiny at the sacrifice of the upgradability, DVD Drive, Card Reader and extra ports. I doubt your relatives would need the extra performance of the A8-7600 and I find that non-techy people rarely upgrade unless they need to when things get really slow or simply do not work anymore. I know my parents are certainly happy with their first gen Intel NUC. They love how small and quiet it is!

One final thing you would need to check yourself though would be Windows 7 compatibility. I'm not sure how you will install it if retail licenses are no longer being sold. Might be worth thinking about Windows 10 as it's really not too bad (although I actually prefer Windows 8.1 but that's just me).

EDIT: After all that I just remembered your thread title was "ITX Build". Well I really failed there haha. You can ignore all references to the mATX info. Options 1, 2 or 4 then.

EDIT2: Seems that eVGA PSU is only a bit above average. For the same price you can get this XFX for £29.99 @ Scan which is much better.

[ik9000]

thanks mate, will have a read at lunchtime.

[EndlessWaves]

Must have win7pro OEM. Doesn't want 8 or 10. Would get retail licence but they no longer exist.

Windows 7 support ends in just four years so I wouldn't go for it on a new system. Go and grab Windows 10 retail, it's very similar.

They would keep existing monitor and peripherals.

What inputs does the monitor have? If it's VGA only then that could be an issue.

Should we look at Brix system or BYO?

If they don't want to compromise performance too much then I'd avoid the low power variants of the mobile chips as used by the NUC and many Brix models as they drop a lot of performance to shave off that last litre or so.

the current mini-ATX is too large and noisy for their liking.

Replacing fans and coolers is easy enough, and it can always be transferred into a smaller Micro ATX case.

Ulti's list of sizes seems to be assuming they want support for full height expansion cards. I haven't seem any mention of that so if they are happy with low profile you'd actually be looking at smaller cases than most of those.

Something like:
Micro ATX: 10-12L
Mini ITX: 5-6L
MiniPC: 2-3L

You can shave a further litre off the ITX/MiniPC sizes by accepting an external power brick instead of an internal power supply, as in the case of Antec's ISK110.

Something like Fujitsu's Q-series models would fit your criteria quite well. They come with fairly powerful processors - ultra low power desktop models, including quad cores - as well as optical drives and measure around 2 litres. Q520/Q920 are the outgoing Haswell models, Q556/Q956 are the incoming Skylake models which don't seem to be available yet.

They don't come are barebones options so the SSD is the usual stingy size and you might want to swap it for a bigger one for them.

[scaryjim]

... Current machine is some sort of Dell. Can, if necessary re-use sata DVD drive and 5.25" multi- card reader + sata HDD if needs be but allow for all-out replacement for now.

If the old PC is a Dell matx, does that mean it's a desktop? Does the monitor sit on top of it? If so, and they'd like to keep a similar set up, that's going to affect your case choices. If the base unit can sit next to the monitor that brings in a range of mini towers that are pretty nice, but if they want that old fashioned monitor-on-case setup it's going to limit things.

Existing CPU is old S775 C2Duo probably not worth keeping. RAM=DDR2. GPU is rubbish. Doubt it would beat modern on-board so binning it. ...

Don't just bin the old hardware: the fact that it's not up to running Vista on an aging hard drive with all the crud that will have accumulated on it over the last X years doesn't mean that it's no use with a fresh install of a lightweight OS on a new hard drive. I'm pretty sure you'll find someone somewhere who'll give you good money for that machine, which means more budget to spend on the new one

Uses: office, internet, no significant gaming ("does chess count?" ). Some (basic) photo editing in elements and music stuff in Sibellius etc.

There's nothing there that even the most basic modern set up wouldn't handle just fine, so the question really is how much of an upgrade over the old system do you want to give them? A quick run down of the actual specs of the old machine would help, so we can get a better idea of the baseline performance they might be happy with: if they're coming from a first gen Core 2 based Pentium or Celeron they're going to expect something a bit different than if they had a higher end Core 2 Duo or Quad.

[DanceswithUnix]

Don't just bin the old hardware: the fact that it's not up to running Vista on an aging hard drive with all the crud that will have accumulated on it over the last X years doesn't mean that it's no use with a fresh install of a lightweight OS on a new hard drive. I'm pretty sure you'll find someone somewhere who'll give you good money for that machine, which means more budget to spend on the new one

Sounds like it would be good enough for a Minecraft server if you installed Linux on it

[scaryjim]

Sounds like it would be good enough for a Minecraft server if you installed Linux on it

I'm running my primary recording rig on a 2.1GHz 3-core Athlon II, NVidia 8300 AM2+ motherboard and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. For running Audacity and a USB audio interface under Win 7 it's more than adequate. For Sibelius I'd want more memory, but 8GB of DDR3 is so cheap nowadays that's it's basically a non-issue for a new build. Until about 18 months ago my primary machine at home was an ultraportable with a 1.3GHz dual-core Pentium (Core-2 based).

We're well beyond the point now where entry level hardware is more than adequate for day-to-day computing; I don't think the minimum specification for running Windows has changed since Windows 7 was released 6 years ago. My (early) Christmas present this year was a Bay Trail tablet: with a 1.33GHz quad core and 2GB of RAM it's more than adequate for Windows 10.

All of which means that the physical requirements for the OP's relatives are probably more important than the tech specs when it comes to putting together a new rig...