Best Bang for your Buck

Having been unsuccessful in my efforts to boot from an NVMe drive on an ancient Gigabyte motherboard, I retired it & for the last 6 months have been happily using a refurbished (so they say) Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF. They come in 3 formats, micro, SFF & desktop so check the format has the ports you require.

Mine cost just over £100 for an i5 6500 & 8GB RAM. Less than £20 to add another 8GB provided the 8GB was one stick & not 2 x 4GB.

Triple boot Windows 8.1, 10 & 11 from 2 NVMe drives – the 2nd NVMe being in a PCIe adaptor. The SFF version can house a separate 3.5″ HDD but an £8 adaptor from Ebay allows a 2.5″ drive to be used.

Dave has previously posted about some small HP desktops in his possession.

Dave, I hope the existance of an old Win10 disk and a 1Tb drive are not driving your decisions. As I and Wasbit/Dave have posted, there are perfectly adequate ready builts available at a cost that is 50% or so of your budget.

Most also come with Windows 11 installed, and available space for the 1Tb drive to be used as a spare/backup storage.

Actually the Beelink that I linked to is a brand new mini-box with a modern CPU that is secure enough to run Widows 11 (included in price). It also has full fat wifi and ethernet. Although it comes with a decent sized SSD there are connections in the box to also add your own SSD if you want (useful for taking data off the old PC, assuming not lost).

I personally gave up building my own new PCs a couple of years ago as I found it very difficult to compete with the prices that OEMs could offer. It also avoided the mobo/cpu/OS/GPU compatibility lotteries.

I picked up the Beelink U59 for my wife.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=beelink+u59+mini+pc&crid=247YIG227VTG2&sprefix=beelink%2Caps%2C75&ref=nb_sb_ss_deep-retrain-0-ops-acceptance_7_7

This is a middle of the range box, as SWMBOs use is probably a bit more serious than your friend. There are others that you can examine by going on to Amazon and searching for Beelink. The £170 Intel J4125 Processor may be more appropriate for your friend, while the more expensive 12Gen ones would give my current setup a bit of competition, and be more than adequate for most gamers.

I would personally steer clear of any boxes that do not have Win11, as Win10 loses support in a couple of years time and the CPU/peripheral reqs for Win11 are a mess and you may select a box which can never be upgraded.

I can vouch that the U59 will take a second SSD.

When you have made an initial selection I do suggest that you contact Beelink and ask if your selection allows the installation of a second 2.5 inch SSD. My guess is that it will, but I think that caution should rule the day.

You can get adapters for most monitor inputs at Amazon etc. Try a search on monitor adapters and look for the correct adapter. My personal choice is to go with a cabled adapter as it eliminates a potentially dodgy connnection.

I am in fact very impressed by Beelink support, they respond both quickly and accurately.

Sorry, been in Cornwall for family things. I’ve been looking at Beelink and Minis Forum https://amz.run/66Q7 and they are attractive propositions. I’ve used a lot of mini PCs in office settings.

For the more traditional PC, I’ve been looking at them too and graphics are the big issue. Even the basic graphics cards are still silly money and that has pushed up the price of CPUs with onboard graphics too.

Your entry level AMD is now the Ryzen 5 4600G 6 Cores,12 Threads and £115. Intel are worse, Core i3 10100 (2 generations behind), 4 Cores 8 Threads, are £145. The latest Core i3 12100 12th Gen is £162 and I have build a system using one (but not at that price) earlier in the year and it is stupidly fast.

However the latest 12th Gen Pentium Gold G7400 is what we would have called an i3 with it’s 2 Cores 4 Threads and is only £75. The onboard graphics are capable of running 4 monitors. The Pentium Gold benchmarks +25% over the Ryzen 5 3500H you’ll typically find in the mini PCs and is not a corner cutting compromise.

This is a £275 E-Buyer shopping list using my current favourite case, my Ryzen 5 4600G system lives in one, but there are plenty of other cases out there. I tried a screenshot of the case but the Forum isn’t having it.

CIT S503 2 x USB 2.0 2 x USB 3.0 Micro ATX Desktop Case 758995 £34.49 £34.49
CWT 300W TFX power supply 1142138 £34.98 £34.98
Intel Pentium Gold G7400 2 Core Alder Lake Processor 1414621 £70.98 £70.98
Gigabyte H610M H DDR4 mATX Motherboard 1415439 £81.77 £81.77
2 x Crucial RAM CT8G4DFRA266 8GB DDR4 2666 MHz CL19 Desktop Memory 1128689 £23.99 £47.98

A total meh. I can’t see any advantage over 10, indeed some is a step backwards.