Ideal "Office PC"? Ideal "Facebook box"?

[VirtualLarry]

I just thought that I would throw this out there.

What would your ideal builds be, for an office PC, and/or a Facebook-type box?

I know I like to build overclocked budget rigs, but those might not be appropriate for office work (Never overclock a work PC!), and overkill for a Facebook-type box.

I'm currently running on a G4400 Pentium Skylake dual-core 3.3Ghz CPU, as I post this, using the iGPU, and it's quite snappy, with a decent SSD and Windows 10 1607 64-bit.

I heard someone else comment that a G3900 Celeron makes a "legendary" "office box".

I'm very pleased, overall, with Skylake, even the lower-end CPUs. Very nice, decent iGPU, great IPC, reasonable prices. The only thing that I wish is that the clocks for the Celeron might have been higher (although I know why they are that low, they are 100Mhz faster than the Haswell Celeron CPUs), and/or adding a TurboBoost clock to the dual-cores.

I would round that out with a decent but cheap H110 board. (I have an Asus H110M-A/M.2 board on order, along with an Intel 600p M.2 NVMe SSD to try out.)

8GB of RAM, and an SSD to round things out. Maybe 16GB RAM if actually necessary for an office box (really big spreadsheets, etc.).

Edit: I think that budget rig builders have never quite had it better.

 

[whm1974]

I myself would pick the Pentium G4500 w/ 8 GB of memory and a small SSD. I will also pick a B150 motherboard over a H110 one.

 

[nerp]

I'd go i3, b150 board, 8gb ram, use onboard GFX. SATA SSD would be good enough.

 

[Torn Mind]

Hmm, I was going to start my own regarding the "ultimate web browsing machine". I'll still do it because it is a different matter from this thread.

"Ideal" facebook box.
i7-6700k
A CPU cooler with a quiet fan
64 GB RAM DDR4-3466 Corsair Dominator RAM
1TB PCIe or M.2 SSD
Z170 board with dual Intel Lan. Headers for legacy ports like Parallel and COM ports. Integrated Wifi.
Windows 8.1
Multiple IPS monitors. The bigger and higher resolution, the better.
Ridiculously high speed internet.
Isolation transformer
Double conversion UPS.
That 80 plus gold Seasonic PSU.

An ideal Office PC must make sure the user pays for slacking. That means internet filters and the utmost strictest logging. heck, the computers might not even have hard drives of their own.

 

[whm1974]

Yeah the i3-6100 will be a better choice for media heavy Facebook pages.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

i3 or i5, (Four threads for chrome and running background tasks like virus scanners, high single-threaded speed for Flash, Firefox and Javascript.)

SSD.

Everything else can be absolute-bottom-of-the-barrel. Doesn't matter.

 

[piasabird]

I have a Gigabyte H110 MB and an i3 which I purchased together at a Micro center and got $30 off the Motherboard by purchasing them there. You might want to check a Micro center for other deals as well. I am not employed by Micro-Center, I am just a happy customer. The motherboard from Gigabyte had an M.2 slot on the back of the motherboard.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Interesting. I thought that the Asus H110M-A/M.2 board that I picked up was the first H110 board with an M.2 slot, which is why I bought that one. (And having picked up the H110M-A original board, as the first Skylake board I ever purchased, which is probably because it was one of the very first boards out there for Skylake.)

 

[Torn Mind]

Users who like to load down their browsers with a bazillion tabs should get moar RAM. An SSD can certainly reduce the lag involved with data being swapped back and forth between RAM and the pagefile and should be prioritized first, but if you want that extra snappiness while hundreds of tabs are opened and don't mind spending money, 32 GB or 64 GB of RAM is worth getting for a Facebook box.

That shouldn't be happening on an office box though, so an i3 would suffice in such an environment, although an i5 should be in the "office" if anything "intense" needs to be done.