Budget Build - Sub £500

[Pob255]

I was just using scan as my base didn't spot you'd used ebuyer

And that opens up the H17 https://www.ebuyer.com/825833-therma...-1j1-00s1nn-01 it's the same larger internals as the H18 but no window and a more solid front bezel.
granted high air will be restricted, however without a high end cpu + overclocking + graphics card high air flow is not required and the increased internal space over the H15 should make cabling easier.

[Zak33]

this all goes to show what a stunnnig pc you can build for £500 doesn't it?

the AMD APU power, as we all know, releases the user to play some half decent games if at any point that's desired. The Ram is still making everyone choke at it's price but most everythnig else is lovely.

[Pob255]

Yes ram prices are nasty esp as ram usage has crept up, it was only 2 years ago I would have said that 4gb was fine for office type pc. But with win10 using 50% ram regardless to what demanding it it's hard to tell.
All told though the base I'd recommend is 8gb and an SSD

[scaryjim]

… it was only 2 years ago I would have said that 4gb was fine for office type pc. But with win10 using 50% ram regardless to what demanding it it's hard to tell. ...

tbh I find web browsers to be by far the worst culprits on memory usage, although I suspect that a good chunk of that is down to a lot of websites streaming in tens of megabytes of javascript libraries to use one or two functions!

I've just opened a new firefox window with 3 open tabs - facebook, twitter, and a wowcher offer. Bam, 800MB of RAM usage. I had an ebuyer product page open in Edge that was chewing 256MB of RAM on it's own … that's one etailer page. What on earth is it doing with all that RAM?*

The web has gotten ridiculous over the last few years....


* I know what it's doing - it's serving ads and running bits of javascript to "improve" the UI. Which is great on my 8GB laptop, but a lot less useful on my 2GB tablet...

[satrow]

tbh I find web browsers to be by far the worst culprits on memory usage, although I suspect that a good chunk of that is down to a lot of websites streaming in tens of megabytes of javascript libraries to use one or two functions!

Time to try Pale Moon again?

[Pob255]

yes web browsers seem to be a big culprit made worse by all the focus of cloud and online based services and software.
Anti virus is still a big hog too which is also a side effect of the above.
windows 10 is also a factor, no one big memory hog, but lots of additional services and background parts running each taking a bit of ram but all those bit's add up.

I'm still of the belief that the fewer the hardware restrictions the more loose developers code gets, tighter hardware restrictions forces people to spend more time trying to do more with less.

[scaryjim]

… windows 10 is also a factor, no one big memory hog, but lots of additional services and background parts running each taking a bit of ram but all those bit's add up. ...

It does at least seem to be reactive to the amount of RAM available - on my laptop an idle desktop takes ~ 3.9GB, while on my tablet it only take ~ 1.3GB (iirc, it's been a while since I checked). But yeah, I'd struggle to recommend 4GB for a desktop

[satrow]

3.9GB on an idle desktop?! I get ~1.2/3 on W10 1803 w/8GB, ~800MB in W7 on the same rig. Time to rethink the auto-running 3rd party stuff and/or customise your OS maybe?

The more crud that's running, the more that also runs inside your browsers (and most everything else).

[spacein_vader]

IIRC Win10 is a lot more aggressive using your RAM when nothing else is (after all, there's no point it doing nothing,) for things like precaching commonly launched apps but is happy to give it up immediately if something else requires it.

In my experience on machines with 4gb, 8gb and 16gb Win10 seems to idle at desktop at just over 50% RAM use. 4gb is still probably enough for a single task at a time but even just multiple office applications open at a time and you'd want 8gb.