Pre-built vs Custom Build PC's for workplace?

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Traditionally we have always had prebuilt computers at work, and I’ve enjoyed custom built PC’s at home (used to be an IT/network engineer).

We are looking at upgrading a couple of PC’s in the office (actually mine and my wife’s, both directors) and are struggling to decide whether to stick with the prebuilt or custom build some PC’s instead.

With prebuilt, we have always bought Dell machines and we don’t have to worry about windows licensing because it comes with the computer, and we get 3 years on site warranty. With custom built, we get to decide what the computer looks like, the specs down to the last component (for example the dells generally can’t take higher end graphics cards).

I’m interested to hear what you guys prefer and whether you run custom builds in your businesses.
 
Soldato
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It depends on the size and needs of the business but general keeping everything the same with no customisations makes it much easier to maintain and support. Otherwise you can be generating a lot of hidden costs that will hit you later.
 
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as above, depends on size of business etc. If go custom build, I'd standardise as much as possible(linus built some custom for his work etc, no aio's or anything, no overclock, big airy cases that can take big sturdy air coolers etc so less to potentially go wrong, or easier to swap out if it does)..all those dell pc's...how often did you use warranty, and how much were they compared to a similar spec custom pc. also, did any freeze up etc.
Ones we had at work were c**p, but needed a few...we ended up buying a few extra..that way if one broke, switch it out asap. What size is your company, how many pc's..do you have a server room etc?
 
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We are not a huge company, have 9 staff but have 14 PC’s (as some equipment needs a dedicated pc).

We do have a server room. We have 2 HP DL360p Gen8 servers and a fair bit of other gear in there.

Our premises is a 5,600 sqft warehouse (2,800 sqft downstairs and a 2,800sqft first floor). All of downstairs is wired to a switch under the stairs, and then 2 fibre cables link that switch to the switch in the server room which caters for all the upstairs network.

With the Dell PC’s, we’ve never actually had any issues. We used to have a Dell server and the PSU died on that. Dell were out very promptly (well their service provider) and they swapped it out no problem. We’ve never needed service on the PC’s.

I’ve also never had any major failures with custom built PC’s, apart from SATA SSD’s failing but I always build with decent parts so minimise the likelihood of faults.

The specific mode I’m looking at at present is about £1,200+vat for a Xeon W1350 cpu, 32GB Ram, 512GB Nvme, Quadro P620 and Windows 10 Pro Workstation edition.

The closest I can build (without case and psu as already have those) is a Core i7 11700k (or will probably wait for the 12700k), 32GB Ram, 512GB PCIe4 SSD, 1030 GPU and Windows 10 Pro for £1100-1150.

Obviously with a custom build, I can improve the specs where it’s needed but if I were to do that on a prebuilt I would risk voiding warranty.
 
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I'd go with a 5900X system over the 11700k but that said Intel are just about to release 12 gen CPUs with higher core counts and a big little design although you may need win 11 to get the best out of them.
 
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I'd go with a 5900X system over the 11700k but that said Intel are just about to release 12 gen CPUs with higher core counts and a big little design although you may need win 11 to get the best out of them.
I don’t think I’d feel confident with a 5900x system for work to be honest. I have a 3800x system at home and I’m not overly keen.
 
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What are you using these PCs for? The specs you're talking about are way beyond normal office desktop use.

Sorry, I should have said. We are a print company and regularly work with photoshop files of around 1GB in size. The PC I currently use is an i5 10600 with 32GB ram and it still struggles with several photoshop files open at the same time.

Reasons why .

Simply put, when I built my 3800x system, it kept crashing when trying to run the memory at full speed, despite the memory being ‘optimised for ryzen’. It’s been ok since but I’ve never had full confidence in it. I just don’t want computers at work that need tinkering with. They need to be stable.
 
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Simply put, when I built my 3800x system, it kept crashing when trying to run the memory at full speed, despite the memory being ‘optimised for ryzen’. It’s been ok since but I’ve never had full confidence in it. I just don’t want computers at work that need tinkering with. They need to be stable.

That's a major reason to buy prebuilt. The company selling you X spec has to be sure the component combinations work before you even buy it.
 
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The specific mode I’m looking at at present is about £1,200+vat for a Xeon W1350 cpu, 32GB Ram, 512GB Nvme, Quadro P620 and Windows 10 Pro Workstation edition.

That's the Precision 3450, right? You're getting a substantial discount on the list price. But the P620 has only 2 GB VRAM and Photoshop really wants 4 GB.

The PC I currently use is an i5 10600 with 32GB ram and it still struggles with several photoshop files open at the same time.

I strongly urge you to find out where your current box is struggling. Is it VRAM? Is it RAM? CPU? GPU? Because upgrading may be a vastly cheaper solution. Just fire up Task Manager and look at the Performance Tab. It will also allow us to advise you better. Going from your brief description, it may just need a RAM upgrade.
 
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That's the Precision 3450, right? You're getting a substantial discount on the list price. But the P620 has only 2 GB VRAM and Photoshop really wants 4 GB.
The Precision 3650 is the one I'm looking at. The 32GB ram is non-ECC ram but as we don't do anything too critical, I don't feel ECC ram is required.

I strongly urge you to find out where your current box is struggling. Is it VRAM? Is it RAM? CPU? GPU? Because upgrading may be a vastly cheaper solution. Just fire up Task Manager and look at the Performance Tab. It will also allow us to advise you better. Going from your brief description, it may just need a RAM upgrade.

Apologies, I may have confused things by talking about one of our current systems. We need two new machines in addition to the machines we currently have so wanting to upgrade mine and my wifes pc's and reuse our current pc's elsewhere.

That being said, I've just opened up one of the 1GB photoshop files and during opening, the SSD hits about 95% which is to be expected. With the file open, memory is sitting at about 91% usage. I've also noticed that Photoshop likes to fill up the scratch disk with numerous 60GB files for some reason.

One other thing I have noticed though is with the Photoshop file open, the CPU speed goes as low as 1.6GHz and jumps up anywhere up to 4GHz. I wonder if that's why it seems to struggle?

The PC in question is a Dell Optiplex 7080 so I will have a look and see what the memory upgrades are.

Thanks :)
 
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I've just opened up one of the 1GB photoshop files and during opening, the SSD hits about 95% which is to be expected.

This is not good. SSDs do not like being near full. It plays havoc with the wear levelling algorithm and shortens their lives.

With the file open, memory is sitting at about 91% usage

So you may not have sufficient RAM for two files. Note though that Windows will try to use RAM if it's available.

with the Photoshop file open, the CPU speed goes as low as 1.6GHz and jumps up anywhere up to 4GHz.

That's fairly standard. If you're doing something intensive, does it stay at 4 GHz? If not, it may be thermal throttling and you may need to repaste it.

From what you've just written your new PC should have a bigger SSD and 64 GB (or more) RAM. Both are quite cheap so why stint?
 
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This is not good. SSDs do not like being near full. It plays havoc with the wear levelling algorithm and shortens their lives.
Thanks. I have, in the past, had a 2TB SATA drive (spinning disk) as a scratch disk for photoshop but the issue then is it is incredibly slow. I may invest in larger SSD's for all the pcs opening large photoshop files as the reason I bought the Optiplex 7080's was due to having 2 nvme slots but haven't actually populated them yet :rolleyes:

So you may not have sufficient RAM for two files. Note though that Windows will try to use RAM if it's available.
Yeh - I can't quite believe that photoshop is maxing out 32GB ram... will be looking at upgrading that sharpish.

That's fairly standard. If you're doing something intensive, does it stay at 4 GHz? If not, it may be thermal throttling and you may need to repaste it.
I'm not sure, I've not watched it to be honest. I will watch it closely today but being a Dell, I wouldn't discount the cooler being poop haha.

From what you've just written your new PC should have a bigger SSD and 64 GB (or more) RAM. Both are quite cheap so why stint?
Agreed :)
 
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Just revisiting this one final time before taking the plunge one way or the other.

I've come across a deal from a Dell reseller on the Dell Precision 3650, with an Intel Xeon W-1350P CPU, 16GB Ram, 256GB nvme and a Quadro P2200 5GB card for £1,000+vat. I would need to upgrade the ram and the ssd, and I've no experience with Xeon CPU's outside of servers.

In comparison I can build the following PC for £970 and then just need to add Windows and a GPU from somewhere.
Intel Core i7 11700k
Asus Prime Z590-A
64GB Corsair Vengeance 3200MHz DDR4
500GB Sabrent PCIe4 NVMe
BeQuiet Pure Base 500 Case
BeQuiet Power 11 600W PSU
BeQuiet Dark Rock CPU Cooler

As has been said above, I don't want to be messing with a system for hours when it decides not to work, and the Dell has the Quadro card included. My concern is with the cooling ability of the Dell PC's which from the reviews I've seen isn't particularly good.
 
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I wouldn't touch the pre built machines by people like Dell unless I was a massive company and was also paying for onsite support etc.

With such a small number of systems I would build them for the current needs also select parts which will also support some upgrade path.

You will be claiming vat back I take it?
 
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I wouldn't touch the pre built machines by people like Dell unless I was a massive company and was also paying for onsite support etc.

With such a small number of systems I would build them for the current needs also select parts which will also support some upgrade path.

You will be claiming vat back I take it?
Sorry, I should have said, the Dell system will include 3 years on site warranty from Dell.

The only parts that have much of an upgrade path are going to be Ryzen which as mentioned, I don't particularly want. Intel, in my experience have never liked the word 'upgrade' so other than Ram/Hdd/GPU, there's not much of an upgrade path there.

We will be claiming VAT back, yes.
 
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