New stationary's for the Office - Build help

[NoBioN]

Hello OC'ers

I need help with a cheap, but snappy build for office PC's. The PC's mainly used for normal office task's like Excel, Internet, mailing and Navision.

I am thinking Intel i3's. but are they overkill? Also since most of our work is stored on a dropbox solution. I think its better to go the SSD route.

The PC's also have to be able to run 2 24 inches screens at the same time, since its important for efficiency

Its important that the cost are kept as low as possible, while still doing a decent job.

Suggestions are very welcome

P.S im located in denmark. So most likely will be bought through Proshop.dk. but post parts here, and i can find same or similiar parts in that shop

 

[ninjacore]

If you want it to feel as snappy as your 2500K OC'd to 4.4, for example, I would recommend i3s at a minimum.

I put together a mostly-office tasks build a few months back and used a G3258 (Haswell Pentium dual core). At its stock speed of ... 3.2 (???), it was noticeably slower than my daily driver i5 rig in basic multitasking. It would start to bog down with more than a couple apps running or more than 5 or so Chrome tabs. When I overclocked it to 4.5Ghz, however, it felt almost the same as my i5 in office tasks. (The Pentium build had the same amount of ram - 8GB - in case you were wondering). Seems like you either need 4 threads or 2 @ a decent clock speed (which is only really possible with a last-gen, unlocked Pentium).

iGPU of any modern chip should easily drive two monitors, just make sure the motherboards you pick up have the appropriate connectors.

I would absolutely do SSDs. Spinning disks are dead outside of data centers and even there, I would say they have about 5 more years

 

[trents]

An i3 should be fine for the office application. But get a higher end i3. But with running those two monitors you want to add in a video card with dual monitor capability. You don't need a gaming level video card but you do need to make sure it will run dual monitors. I get these used Dell cards off ebay for the type of setup you are speaking of.

This is perfect for what you want to do with it: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optipl...550306?hash=item3f52b54222:g:gnUAAOSweW5U5mAk

 

[ninjacore]

While a dedicated GPU would certainly be ideal and would take some load off the CPU, the iGPU on all modern chips can drive two displays so long as the motherboard supports it (and most modern boards have multiple outs). Definitely ensure the boards/CPUs you are looking at will support it, but you can probably save a few bucks skipping the dGPU.