Warning: questions about boring office machine in this thread...

[stefk005]

Title says it all!! I'm building a machine for office use - no games, only plenty of multi-tasking with boring office apps and multimedia.

I have a budget of £300 - £400, which needs to cover an mATX case, mobo, CPU and RAM. Already have a new Corsair PSU, Force 3 SSD and DVD-RW.

So, which would be the faster platform on this budget, Intel 1155 or AMD FM1? Am happy to overclock a bit with a half-decent cooler factored in. Any recommendations for the mobo? Not too worried about the specific chipset, as long as it has USB 3/SATA3 etc, and decent built-in graphics.

Also, anyone have any experience with Shuttle-based systems? I'm looking for a discreet, smart and small-as-poss case, and the Shuttles look good. However they're not cheap. How do the quality of their mobo's and PSU's compare with Asus/Gigabyte and Corsair equivalents? Anyone have a good case to recommend otherwise?

Any advice appreciated! Cheers!

 

[stefk005]

Thanks for the above suggestions. One thing I forgot to mention is that I want external 5.25 AND 3.5 (or second 5.25) spaces. That's partly the reason why I was veering towards mATX.

I did say "as small as possible"... however I meant that in terms of mATX size - I'm not needing tiny mini-ITX size. Sorry for not being clearer!! As you say Orcvader, a case like the Prodigy is no smaller than some of the smaller Lian-Li mATX cube or the Fractal Design Mini cases anyway.

And presumably with a decent mATX mobo like http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-520-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2265 a bit of overclocking should be possible? If video is a concern with the Intel CPU's, aren't the AMD offerings supposed to be better, especially at similar price points?

Thanks!

 

[stefk005]

EDIT: Anything that isn't a K series CPU (bar an exception for LGA2011) is locked down pretty tight. You can't OC via BCLK by that much without other things cocking up.

Yes, that's why I was beginning to wonder about an AMD APU - overclocked they prob wouldn't be much different to an i3, with the advantage of better graphics, as I understand?