What would you do?

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

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Purely for investigation purposes (and to see if im right in something that has annoyed me for a while) im curious to see what you would do in this situation:

You work for a secondary school, lots of pcs and laptops with a limited budget
The most intensive app on the network is adobe web premium CS5 (photoshop/dreamweaver/flash)
You are replacing a suite of computers, what spec do you go for?

Im not going to give anything away as to what we currently buy or what i know some other schools buy or how much we spend (yet), im just curious as to what you as an individual would buy.

Required components:
CPU:
Motherbord:
Memory:
power supply:
hard drive:
(no case, monitor or peripherals required in this list)

EDIT: seeing as your all fussy gits that it's hard to be vague with :D see post #10 http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=17596275&postcount=10 for more info
 
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Maximum number of PCs that could handle the applications at an acceptable speed, rather than a handful of GOOD pcs that do it really well, that way more students get opportunity to learn.

As for specs... without know a budget its impossible to give one!

I would work backwards... budget of £60,000, how many students do we have.... how many are scheduled for a PC based class at one time, how many pcs do we require as a BASE value... Then balance the budget vs the number needed vs specification of machine to handle the job sufficiently.

Make the children build the PCs for you as part of a D/T programme (assuming your students are reasonably well behaved).

So no you can't have a spec from me! :D
 
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rexehuk said:
Maximum number of PCs that could handle the applications at an acceptable speed, rather than a handful of GOOD pcs that do it really well, that way more students get opportunity to learn.

As for specs... without know a budget its impossible to give one!

I would work backwards... budget of £60,000, how many students do we have.... how many are scheduled for a PC based class at one time, how many pcs do we require as a BASE value... Then balance the budget vs the number needed vs specification of machine to handle the job sufficiently.
Click to expand...

Generally we don't have a budget per room, we have a budget for the year and just purchase what we require, if we need 30 PCs we find a spec and buy 30 to fill a suite. Just need to know what spec people would go for knowing it's a school but without knowing a budget (only after individual pc cost rather than 30)
 
Thing is you cant really mass build custom pcs for things like this, as much as it would be nice to get better pcs, by buying from a large PC supplier you get bulk licenses and technical support that would be missing by buying them custom
Edit: Also assuming it runs on a network youd need a good fast server, dont skimp here, then yeah as many PCs as you might need, so if you have say a class of 30, its best to get 33 (10% allowance) in case a couple do go down so all the students can work at same time
 
I'd guess...

CPU: Core 2 Duo
Motherbord: ITX DG41MJ perhaps?
Memory: 1 GB
power supply: 300W
Hard drive: Depends on how the network is managed... if you have remote storage servers then something tiny which can be locked.

I was going to suggest £120 per machine max... I think the above spec falls well below that budget?

Obviously bulk buy would be the way to go... The custom build PC thing was a joke, but some kids would benefit from learning how to build PCs... no skills like that are taught anymore unless you go to college etc.
 
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95thrifles said:
Thing is you cant really mass build custom pcs for things like this, as much as it would be nice to get better pcs, by buying from a large PC supplier you get bulk licenses and technical support that would be missing by buying them custom
Click to expand...

We have done for over 4 years, we still get warranty per component (on building we keep a record of the date of purchase on each component + the warranty length). And our suppliers are excellent on prices and replacement parts etc

Over 500 PCs here are custom built from either individual components or motherboard bundles. The only purchase mistake we've ever made is bothering to buy foxconn motherboards 3 years ago (never again!)
 
OK fair enough, I wouldnt of thought a school/large company would do that (mine doesnt) but I stand corrected then
Actual spec is largely dependent on budget though, if you could Id look at athlon quad core with 4 gig of RAM for the above use, bot sure how that would tally in with your budget and required number of PCs though
 
Oh... make sure the PSUs don't have 110/240V power switches at the back, kids like to switch them while they are turned on for "lulz" resulting in a nice pop and a dead PC.

Not speaking from experience in school of course...
 
rexehuk said:
Oh... make sure the PSUs don't have 110/240V power switches at the back, kids like to switch them while they are turned on for "lulz" resulting in a nice pop and a dead PC.

Not speaking from experience in school of course...
Click to expand...

I know there are a lot of different factors to think of when thinking of a spec of machines, but i want people to think of this as the following:

Don't worry about the money
Don't worry about little things like the power supply switches
Don't try to spec it to a budget, just spec it what you THINK a school should use - i know it's not as simple as it sounds but there is no specific budget.

Essentially my reason behind this is to get an idea as to what people think a school should be spending on a PC, not what they actually are, i think a lot of schools completely over spend per pc and over spec, we spend about £155 on - cpu, ram, motherboard, hdd and power supply. I'm seeing schools buying i5s and i7s which i regard is incredibly stupid, i wondered how many of you, some working in IT, some only using it as a hobby would make the mistake of over speccing....but sadly it doesn't appear as simple as that as your all too fussy :D

just to answer your post though: all our computers are completely inaccessible to kids so power supply switches aren't an issue :)
 
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£150 for all that? thats v cheap imo, i5/i7 is way overkill yes, as before good little athlon should do trick, e.g.

AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 630 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £70.49 (£59.99)
OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Low-Voltage Dual Channel (OCZ3G1333LV4GK) £64.61 (£54.99)
Asus M4A78LT-M 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £48.99 (£41.69)
Corsair CX 430W ATX Power Supply £37.98 (£32.32)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (ST3250318AS) £28.19 (£23.99)

For the purposes of photoshop and the like quad core = plus, 4 gig RAM = plus
Then cheap mobo with onboard gfx (enough for uses) small(ish) but quick HDD and cheap but reliable PSU
 
From the horse's mouth...

CS5 Web Premium system requirements:

Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1; or Windows 7
1GB of RAM
9.1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash-based storage devices)
1280x800 display (1280x1024 recommended) with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
Some features in Adobe Bridge rely on a DirectX 9–capable graphics card with at least 64MB of VRAM
DVD-ROM drive
Java™ Runtime Environment 1.5 or 1.6
QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
Adobe Flash® Player 10 software required to export SWF files
Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

My own work machine (sees some 3D CAD, etc) would easily cut the mustard - a ~2GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, X1300 pro.
 
Personally, I'd say that a spec which was upgradable make sense. For this reason I'm ruling out C2D's. So something with a cheap AMD dual-core to start but that has the scope to have a quad or hex core later if need be. Equally the ram should be a single stick so more could be added later if needed.

As many folks around here may have noticed I'm a big fan of rolling upgrades. If you have a lot of DDR2 around in older pc's then why bin it? Why not use? So I'd say build using Asrock N68C-S UCC mobos. DDR2 now but the scope to buy and fit DDR3 later if needed or when prices next bottom out. Using existing DDR2 may even cut the need for any ram in today's builds.

Prices are only for a rough guide line.
My spec would be.

Asrock N68C-S UCC £28.98 ex vat
AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 250 3.00GHz £39.99 exc vat
Corsair CX 430W ATX Power Supply £32.32 exc vat
Samsung EcoGreen F2 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache £24.67 exc vat
Kingston 1GB (1x1GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C5 £16.99 exc. vat

Memory may not even be needed as discussed above. This psu to allow for later cpu upgrades. This hdrive because a 250GB is only pennies cheaper and this EcoGreen will recover that in elec. savings.

Cheers,
vfm
 
I would look to a thin client / server approach.

It is relatively easy to add clients.
Security is mainly aimed at the server.
Cheap low power, low noise and low cost clients.

Expensive server but can be backed up easier.
Higher cost of networking clients.

Client
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-004-ZT&groupid=43&catid=1817&subcat=
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-057-AC&groupid=17&catid=276&subcat=
+ keyboard and mouse
memory and HDD to be installed to suit user, 1Gb SoDimm and 10-20Gb 2.5"

DVD drives for installation can be USB and only required to be out as necessary.

andy.
 
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nkata said:
I would look to a thin client / server approach.

It is relatively easy to add clients.
Security is mainly aimed at the server.
Cheap low power, low noise and low cost clients.
Less likely to be stolen

Expensive server but can be backed up easier.
Higher cost of networking clients.

andy.
Click to expand...

We're running a very limited quantity of terminal services here, main reason for not going down that route en mass is due to the impact that flash based applications have on them.

Personally i love terminal services thin client solutions but in education environments there are so many flash based apps and web apps that it impacts the performance too much. At one point we had a whole 30 computer suite running terminal services on server 2003R2 load balanced over two servers, it was a bit slower than a standard box but nothing too drastic until a course was changed to having to run a program that was entirely flash based, as soon as 30 pupils loaded it the servers crawled to a death.

EDIT: that said, it was over 3 years ago this was last attempted, thin client solutions have gone up leaps and bounds sine then so it may be a future possibility if more of the processing has moved on to the thin client now

EDIT2: i should also mention that the computers all run windows 7 32bit at present, managed to make XP a thing of the past here :) so 1GB ram is a minimum spec, we don't generally buy less than 2GB memory anymore with new PCs
 
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As much as custom built PCs might be a little bit more expensive than chinese dell likes, it will probably work out a lot cheaper in the long run.

Say for example, 30quid AM3 mobo, athlonII x240, 2GB of ram, cheap reliable PSU ( also on the scale of school, the efficiency over a non branded chinese will pay back in electricity cost ).

Now say those will last 3yrs or so, then by that time x6s will be going for 30quid each, you'll be able to upgrade the whole lot to 4x the performance for 40-50quid each ( x4/x6 cpu + 2gb ram ).
 
(edit) IMHO...............Most large organisations want to be buying as boxes, not components. They also want to have warranty and service agreements that swap out and replace the computer quickly. To maintain and replace components, you need a technician almost on call 100% (therefore you need two as cover) at £30k minimum each per annum, you need a stock bin of parts to cover failures. You would need to record every permutation of every machine you own, its history, failures, upgrades, upgradeability etc. You need to have full software licensing records as each time you rebuild, you need to reactivate.

One heck of a lot of electricity.

Unless the school software is set to increase massively in complexity, I do not see a need for hexcore processors anytime soon, even in three years.

andy
 
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Is that an opinion or advice nkata?

If it's the latter - we've been building PCs custom for the past 4 years so trust me we're not looking for advice, not meaning to sound like a **** or anything but we don't need advice on how to operate :)

This thread is purely for investigation purposes, no help needed or anything. Like i say in the OP where something has annoyed me for a while, we're better at speccing PCs and managing the replacement and construction than most other school out there, that may sound a bit big headed but i've seen first hand how the vast majority of schools overspend and over spec. We're also making the most of the technology available to us as well, i think it may be time to start making more use of terminal services soon though seeing as it's evolved a fair bit, but thats for the future.

If it's the former then, fair enough :p
 
By
nkata said:
(edit) IMHO...............Most large organisations want to be buying as boxes, not components. They also want to have warranty and service agreements that swap out and replace the computer quickly. To maintain and replace components, you need a technician almost on call 100% (therefore you need two as cover) at £30k minimum each per annum, you need a stock bin of parts to cover failures. You would need to record every permutation of every machine you own, its history, failures, upgrades, upgradeability etc. You need to have full software licensing records as each time you rebuild, you need to reactivate.

One heck of a lot of electricity.

Unless the school software is set to increase massively in complexity, I do not see a need for hexcore processors anytime soon, even in three years.

andy
Click to expand...

That's all nice and easy in theory but in practice its 10th times faster to troubleshoot pc urself and swap out or rma whatever part then try to get it shipped and fixed our replaced by dell like companies. They say its next day swap but in reality it takes weeks and ages spent trying to get through their support lines.

If you build quality pc it's very unlikely that something will break anyways.
And even tho PhotoShop or some other stuff might require minimum only p4 or c2d, ill wish your students luck trying to do any graphic work on p4. They will spend half hour of the lesson just on loading times.
 
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