A good cpu for office work?

[ntg]

What's a good cpu for office related work. That would be 90% MS Office (mainly word, excel and outlook). A bit of browsing and video streaming on the side would be great (supporting 1080p video is a must).

If it's passive cooled would be ideal although I understand that may not be an option - but please recommend any quiet cooler if possible.

This will be for an office build, so I would prefer it to be quiet and inexpensive, as I imagine even low end cpus have plenty of grunt for office applications.

The system will have an ssd.

 

[Marine-RX179]

An Intel NUC unit may be?
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-384-OK&groupid=43&catid=2476

Building it yourself should save some money.

 

[eddiew]

Possibly relevant; a couple of years ago I was working on a project with a big Excel number cruncher, and we found Intel CPUs to be noticably (50-70%) faster than AMD in this area. That may since have levelled out, but just something to be aware of as a possibility, if you have any particularly large spreadsheets.

Within the Intels we had, from a Core2Duo to a Xeon, there was little difference, and I'm quite sure even a Haswell i3 would do you just fine. I like Marine-RX179's suggestion of a little NUC box, I'm sure the guys in our office wish their desktops were so tiny!

One thought though; any reason not to consider a middle spec laptop? Many run quietly, and you get the bonus of portability

 

[dacads]

G3220 would be an ideal option

 

[Marine-RX179]

One thought though; any reason not to consider a middle spec laptop? Many run quietly, and you get the bonus of portability

That's actually a good point. Entry level laptops are so cheap these days (around £270-£350), building a budget desktop plus the spending on a display and a oem copy of Windows could easily end up costing more.

 

[ntg]

That's actually a good point. Entry level laptops are so cheap these days (around £270-£350), building a budget desktop plus the spending on a display and a oem copy of Windows could easily end up costing more.

The person for whom the build is planned already has a laptop.

From my experience laptop grunt is not that great for multitasking. There will be several spreadsheets open, and word docs and browser tabs. I don't think a laptop will be good value given that for around £400 I could build a nice desktop (+monitors of course).

I will consider it however..it's not a bad thought.

 

[Marine-RX179]

From my experience laptop grunt is not that great for multitasking. There will be several spreadsheets open, and word docs and browser tabs. I don't think a laptop will be good value given that for around £400 I could build a nice desktop (+monitors of course).

I think ithe biggest issue with the laptops you referring to being slow is because of its snail speed 5,400rpm HDD, rather than the Intel CPU being not fast enough to be honest.

But if the guy already have a laptop, then yea make a desktop (should give the Intel NUC some though, which can be mounted to the vesa mount at the back of the monitor) and get a nice big screen.