business vs. consumer PC

[Tomsk]

Our company will be upgrading our twelve 7 year old PCs. Mostly i3-7th gen, 8GB RAM, 128 SSD (sata)

The PC's are lightly used. Email, web and load a file from a server to edit in Word or Excel and save it back again.
Our current PC's are still more than capable for this task.
We're upgrading for better security.

A couple of quotes we have had are for major brand 'business' PCs i5-14th gen, 16GB RAM, 512 NVME for £650-£700
I can get a 'consumer' PC - Ryzen 5000 series, 16GB RAM, 512 NVME for ~£250-£300

One of the selling points I've heard is better support for the business PCs which I think is pointless.

Any OS or server problems will be fixed by our IT contractor
Any software problems will be fixed by the software developer
Any hardware faults can be fixed (is replace part) by me, or by simply replacing the whole PC


Given our usage, is there any advantage to buying the PCs from a major brand and getting their support?

 

[Mujja]

For the small number of computers and with you having the knowledge to diagnose and replace parts yourself, go with custom.

Some of the business brands like HP and DELL use custom motherboards, PSUs etc, meaning you can't easily replace parts or upgrade.

 

[nlel1975]

Can get base spec Mac mini m4 16GB 10 Core CPU 256GB NVMe for £529 if you can switch to MacOS. Macs are very secure I’m led to believe.

 

[Tetras]

Given our usage, is there any advantage to buying the PCs from a major brand and getting their support?

For cheaper stuff (i.e. sub £500-£600 or so), I often find that prebuilt are actually better value than DIY, especially if you need to buy a retail price license for the OS.

The downside is proprietary parts that are difficult to replace/upgrade.

 

[Journey]

Given our usage, is there any advantage to buying the PCs from a major brand and getting their support?

Nope, if you do have one go wrong just buy an extra identical unit as a hot spare at the same time as the original order, and fix the faulty/broken one. I'd alos be tempted to look at Miniforum/Beelink machines or similar, low power use and easy to work with still, and can be mounted on a VESA bracket.

 

[edscdk]

have sold 1000's of PCs over 25 years.. for 12 machines.. if the business has money, just buy 12x new dells @ 600 a pop, if you have no money, snag 12x 10th-gen i5's of ebay for 150 a pop and clone the old machines onto the new and upgrade the OS to windows 11.. get 12 of the same machines its easy enough.. modern PCs so rarely go wrong its just not something id consider, i give 3 years warranty on 10th gen i5's.. used 10th gen i5 and v new dell i5 there will be no perceivable performance difference for your usage and they are not any more likley to have issues.. PM me if you want to discuss more (i only sell stuff locally, so unless you live in my town, i don't want to sell you anything just help you decide what to do)