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Intel Pentium vs i3 vs AMD for ultra low end office PC

Englander91

Englander91

Englander91

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Joined
25 Sep 2016
Posts
174
Hello,

I'm scoping out ideas for new PC for my grandfather. It needs to be able to run Gmail and Word - that really is about it. He's currently got a cheap PC from 2005 which sounds like a plane but runs like a snail.

What range of processors should I be looking at in terms of minimising costs, maximising longevity, whilst maintaining some level of capability if anything more demanding is ever requested of it (i.e. a little media centre or something)?
 
It will depend on the total cost including motherboard and RAM so make sure to consider the total. Saying that many of the costs will be in common (case, PSU, SSD, OS, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.). Note an SSD is a must.

From most to least capable:
  • Intel 1150 or 1151 i3 (£110-135)
  • Intel 1150 or 1151 Pentium (£52-75)
  • AMD FM2 or FM2+ A4/A6/low-end-A8 (£26-74)
  • AMD AM1 (£22-39)

Looking at motherboards, AM1 mobos are the cheapest by far (£25+), but the CPUs are very slow and I probably wouldn't go down that route.

I wouldn't go with the i3s considering they're twice as much as the Pentiums.

I doubt he'll notice any difference between the other options. Motherboards seem to all start at 40-50. An AMD FM2(+) could be a good moneysaver if you pick one with a good clock speed, e.g.:

My basket at Overclockers UK:


​

For a relatively small increase in price though a Pentium system probably has more longevity. Either 1150 (H81) or 1151 (H110).
 
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Remember that a Skylake Celeron/Pentium setup will use DDR4, unlike the other choices. Doubt the difference will be noticeable except maybe when using the on-board graphics, but it might add slightly to the total cost.
 
I built my dad a computer fairly cheaply with a haswell pentium, H81 board, 8gb of 1600 ddr3 Ram and a 120gb SSD. It fits his needs perfectly and is very quiet.

I wouldn't go near that trinity APU, it's four gens old now on that socket.
 
For precisely this purpose I gave my Grandad a PC I bought for £30 from the Friday Ad with a socket 775 Pentium Dual Core and 4GB of DDR2. I put a £10 second hand SSD in it and it absolutely flies for general Word/internet/picture management. Boots in no time flat as well... Windows 10 helps with that too!
 
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Windows 8 or 10 with SSD or eMMC and a low end CPU runs like greased lightning compared to Win 7 and earlier with a hard drive.

Got my dad a laptop with A6-4400m (single module, dual core piledriver @ 2.7 - 3.2GHz) and a 128mb SSD running W10. The only time you notice the CPU is slow is unpacking and running large batches of windows updates. Day to day it's absolutely fine because he doesn't do anything CPU intensive.
 
Just put in my online basket a build with a Pentium G4400/H110 (seems like a good middle ground based on comments), 120GB Sandisk Plus SSD, 8GB Corsair Value Select RAM, and I'm at £211,excluding PSU and OS which I have already.

Thanks for the input everyone, I think that's what I'm going to put forwards.
 
Not to lob a spanner in the works - but do you really need to build a PC if it's that low spec?

Might not something come up on offer at a nice price that will suffice?
 
Uriel said:
Not to lob a spanner in the works - but do you really need to build a PC if it's that low spec?

Might not something come up on offer at a nice price that will suffice?
Click to expand...

Spanners are fine. I'm not tied to anything in particular.

Are you referring to a second hand offer or something? I always like to buy new with PC stuff for the warranty as much as anything. I also quite enjoy doing the building myself.
 
My parents are running a Core 2 Duo E7500 and that's doing a great job as an office/workstation PC. Running Win 10 etc...

Just make sure it has 4Gb of ram at least and ideally an SSD.

The CPU for web based stuff and word processing doesn't have to be top notch.

I would get an i3 for these requirements.
 
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