Which works fine…for now, until it doesn’t.
Not really on desktops. They often have proprietary cases and motherboards, but everything else is standard: m.2 or SATA drives, PCIe slots, USB C, standard DDR4/5 RAM. My Lenovo desktop has 2x m.2 slots and room for 4 SATA disks.
Thanks, everybody, for your input.
I am replacing my current desktop because it’s maddingly almost always in a state of “100% Disk Usage”. I have tried every solution posted on the Net, with no satisfaction. The PC is also incredibly slow to boot, which may be related to the disk usage issue.
I am not at all interested in building my own, and I don’t want to ever open the case and upgrade the RAM (or anything else, for that matter). That’s why I’m opting for 32 GB of RAM.
I am also not interested to converting to a Mac at this point in my life. I think Apple builds a fine computer, but I’ll stick with Windows, even with all its flaws.
You all have given me much to consider. Please continue!
$2,000 is too much. You’re getting into virtual reality gaming territory, and it sounds like that isn’t one of your interests. You should be able to get a machine that is plenty good enough in the 1200 to 1400 range.
And that’s exactly what I’m looking at right now. I’m leaning toward Lenovo at the moment, but that may change.
In favor of what? I’m seeing that AMD processors have higher failure rates than Intel.
The Intel Core I-9 13900KF at $569 is plenty powerful enough for your needs or, if you want to save $150 or so, the good 'ole reliable I-7 would be fine, also.
What you want to keep in mind is that, what is considered “da bomb” in the heavy user community, is going to be way more expensive than processors that are 90% or more just as good. The Intel Xeon W9-3495X is something like $5,889, but something 90% or more just as good is far, far less. You want to look for a happy medium.
Isn’t this a 13th generation processor? One which @Askance warned about?
My research shows no statistically significant difference in terms of reliability, but maybe I haven’t looked in the right places. As for myself, the track record of tech is very important. The I-7 has been around for a long time now, and I trust it. Were I you, I personally would go with that because it takes a while to earn my trust if you are tech equipment. LOL
There is a microcode issue (the instructions basically written into the chips) on the Intel 13th & 14th gen chips that can cause the chip to degrade over time due to poor voltage regulation. Supposedly new updates to the boards fix this but you don’t know if you have a PC manufactured with a board using the updated code.
It’s really an i7 and i9 issue so if you bought a computer with an i3 or i5, it shouldn’t be a problem. But then we’re back to most PCs coming out of the box with 32GB are probably “performance” type machines using an i7/i9 processor. Other options would be to look into updating the code yourself (not a hard process; you download onto a flash drive and look up how to flash your board) or, of course, just going with an AMD processor. Alternately, a 12th gen processor would be fine for the OP’s use case. Frankly an i7 or i9 is overkill but the 32GB thing is boxing us in.
Annoyingly, I checked out Dell’s site and the more modestly priced desktop system couldn’t be upgraded to 32GB through their configuration menu.
I never had the issue when doing the classic “Refurb a retired office 4th gen Optiplex you bought for $50” thing but HAVE had the issue when messing with more modern systems. Though this was a few years ago, back when GPUs were so rare that people would buy a prebuilt from Dell, etc with a GPU, strip out the GPU for their own system and sell the rest of the machine for a couple hundred bucks. Since you’d buy the lowest spec machine as all you wanted was that GPU inside, someone trying to use the PC would want to upgrade from its sad 8GB single stick memory. You had to be a bit careful making sure you bought a stick the BIOS would accept, unlike those 4th gens where I’d get two sticks of eBay or AliExpress mystery RAM and it would boot up fine.
What I did recently was to replace a desktop tower system with a notebook computer connected to a USB-C dock (and external hard drive for more storage than the one-terabyte SSD). Effectively, it’s no different from a desktop computer but with the option of taking the system elsewhere.
That is way too much money. There’s no reason a basic machine with 32 GB of RAM should cost that much. It should be like $700 to $1000 tops new, even less refurb or open box.
OP, the CPU won’t matter for your needs. They’re all overkill for your described needs. If you’re worried about the latest Intel issues, just get an AMD. Personally I wouldn’t worry too much about it either way. Most CPU generations have issues of one sort or another but usually they only pop up for gamers and enthusiasts who push them to their limits. Your needs would barely push a modern system past idle.
It’s better to buy a $700 computer now and another $700 one a few years later than a $1400 one now. Double the price will not get you double the performance or reliability. It would just rip you off.
If you want a middle ground, you can consider buying a small business machine with an extended support contract and in-home service. Then at least you’re paying for peace of mind.
But honestly, PC hardware is a commodity market that’s constantly racing to the bottom. Don’t waste good money buying overpriced desktops, especially. They rapidly depreciate and it almost always makes sense to bank your money for later replacements rather than paying more upfront.
Too late to edit:
I get the feeling that a few hundred dollars won’t make or break anything for the OP.
The thing is, it doesn’t meaningfully buy anything in the commodities PC market except branding/prestige. True performance or reliability upgrades require big architectural changes, the kind you only see across generations or platforms (eg a Mac, or a PC with server hardware, or perhaps a laptop with an Arm processor).
You’re not going to get a meaningful difference within computers of the same generation (especially when you’re not buying a GPU or gamer parts), even at double the cost. There’s no real magic they can apply to magically lengthen its life. They wouldn’t, because every manufacturer from Intel to Microsoft to the PC resellers depend on upgrade cycles to survive. PCs are unfortunately disposable commodities and planned obsolescence is the name of the game.
The essential parts are only made by a few OEMs around the world and then whitelabeled and resold around the world. Most of what the big names do is branding and packaging and negotiating sales and support channels. There’s little significant difference in the actual hardware within a generation.
Hmm…maybe I should rethink my 32 GB RAM requirement…
RAM is the easiest and cheapest way to increase computer performance. I have 64 GBs of RAM and a video card with 6 GBs of its own. I do heavy duty gaming, though, so I may not be a good example.
You don’t need it, but if you can afford it and never want to open the box yourself to upgrade it later (even though it literally takes 5 min and a screwdriver)… might as well? RAM more than CPU is more likely to be a constraint for your described uses (even though it’s still very unlikely to reach 16 GB, much less 32 GB, at least for now).
Very few home users can manage to push a CPU to its limits (because that requires active processing, which there is very little of in day-to-day use, which is why the market has shifted from performance to “efficiency cores” that can do those basic tasks with less power). However, having a bunch of browser windows, big spreadsheets, and photos open all at the same time, for days or weeks on end, will often use a lot of RAM even if they’re just sitting idle doing nothing. Browsers these days are a bit better about caching some of that stuff in the background (essentially hibernating them in the background), but it’s not a perfect science, so more real RAM is safer.
If you have too little RAM (like 4GB or 8GB), it can cause disk thrashing (i.e., sustained high disk usage) because the operating system constantly has to swap things out from your fast RAM to your comparative slow SSD or (even slower spinning-disk hard drive) and back and forth. With 16 GB that will likely not be a problem for many years. With 32 GB it will certainly not be a problem before the rest of the system is obsolete, probably when Microsoft decides it’s time to sell Windows 14.
Edit: Just as a point of reference, as a professional programmer, I use a 16 GB machine at work (because I asked for it when they tried to give me an 8). At home, I have a 32 GB machine because I game on it on occasion, and also wanted to experiment with some of the generative AI stuff. I work with medium-sized datasets (a few thousand or tens of thousands of rows) from time to time, along with frequent video and photo editing.
Even for home users, I would recommend 16 GB. I don’t think manufacturers should be selling 8 GB machines anymore… I haven’t had one of those in more than a decade, and even back then they were occasionally problematic. 32 is still overkill for most people, but it’s also affordable enough that it’s often a “why not” rather than a “why the heck”.
And the list of compatible RAM is not exclusive, just includes the sticks tested with the system. I’ve never had a problem using a large manufacturer like Kingston or G.SKILL. If you go with an off brand like PNY, that’s where you might have issues.
Hard drive or SSD?
Exactly. I built a top-of-the-line Raptor Lake and kept it under $2000. Of the shelf should be much cheaper. A budget of $1000 is not unreasonable.
I notice no discussion of a video card. Besides RAM size, that is typically the biggest bottleneck on a computer. With how graphic intensive most of the software is given running under Windows, I wouldn’t consider anything under 8GB VRAM.
Hard drive - Seagate model st1000dm003-1sb102
Yes, I should have included that in my OP. I’m including a NVIDIA card in all the configs I’m looking at. I think 6GB is the smallest in these configs.
Apologies if this has been said upthread, which I didn’t carefully read. I think my needs are similar to yours, and what I’ve been doing is going to a local computer shop and asking them to build one for me free of crapware. This has been a smashing success. Last time I let them sell me a refurbished model for very cheap, a brand I’d never even heard of, and it works like a dream for my needs. They buy them from businesses, cleanse them of crap, and re-sell to people like me who aren’t too particular except I don’t want a machine full of HP ads and Norton popups, and the model works perfectly.
Then it is a physical problem, not a usage problem.
If you truly do not want to upgrade your system, then bigger is better here. I normally have to replace my video card after a couple of years simply because of newer software. The benefit is I have a bunch of low-end cards for when I have to do testing.
Assumedly this has Windows pre-installed? This is an option I really hadn’t considered. Might have to look into it.
Yes, Windows 11 in this case, and I even got them to tweak it a bit to look more like the Windows 10 that I’m used to.