Building 2 office machines

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

thats interesting Jim, i'll have a look at how a build using that works out

Shame your budget is not a bit higher - the 4C/4T Ryzen 3 2200G should come it at roughly £90 next month(hopefully) and it should offer enough CPU and GPU to last many years for most office tasks IMHO OFC.

[scaryjim]

Shame your budget is not a bit higher - the 4C/4T Ryzen 3 2200G should come it at roughly £90 next month ...

I almost suggested that, but given the "cheap as possible" requirement held off. Performance-wise it will be a lot faster (somewhere between a 7th gen core i3 and i5), but it's a fair chunk of extra outlay. I'd still expect a 2C/4T Ryzen APU to launch in the ~£60 market, but since there's nothing official on that I also wouldn't hold my breath for it

thats interesting Jim, i'll have a look at how a build using that works out

I have a tendency to poke ebuyer as my first call for purchasing:

Recommended build (AM4, Bristol Ridge)
7th Generation A8 9600 APU - £56
MSI A320M PRO-VD PLUS - £44
1x 8GB* Patriot Viper Elite DDR4-2400 - £81

Gives you the base of a decent office system for less than £200


* single channel RAM isn't ideal, but for office tasks it shouldn't make a huge amount of difference; it will mainly impact IGP performance which won't be as important. Moving to a 2x 4GB DDR4 kit will cost another ~£15

Cheap-as-chips passable build
AMD A4-6300 dual core APU - £30
Gigabyte F2A68HM-S1 - £32
2x 4GB Corsair Value DDR3-1333 - £60

That's just over £120 for the base of an absolute lowest possible spec office machine (the Intel equivalent - a Celeron G3930 and cheap H110 motherboard - costs ~ £10 more, but would be faster), but you'd have the issue of being on an EOL platform, so if anything went wrong in a year or two you'd potentially be replacing the whole thing...