WhizInTraining Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Hi, It's the time of year where we have to start looking for prices for computers to purchase, but the truth is, I've never done anything like this before, so haven't got much of an idea on what to look for in terms of spec. What would you guys suggest I look for in a spec?
Oaktech Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 What do you need them to do? Are you a primary school looking for an ICT suite machine, or a Teacher desktop or a secondary school looking for a media suite machine? I could say get a core i7 with 16gb of ram and it'd do pretty much everything, but it might well be overkill in a primary!
tmcd35 Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Decide your budget first and look at specs from there. My current gold standard is: £450 inc. monitor. Quad Core, 8Gb, SSD, AiO, Hard Glass Screen, and at least 3yr warranty. And that's very achievable. Always get at least 3 quotes. I tend to ask VeryPC, Novatech, and Stone - and bash them for price until one of them breaks. 2
DPrince Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Decide your budget first and look at specs from there. My current gold standard is: £450 inc. monitor. Quad Core, 8Gb, SSD, AiO, Hard Glass Screen, and at least 3yr warranty. And that's very achievable. Always get at least 3 quotes. I tend to ask VeryPC, Novatech, and Stone - and bash them for price until one of them breaks. Is that ex-VAT?
tmcd35 Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Is that ex-VAT? Yes, only ever work with ex-VAT figures. 1
WhizInTraining Posted June 11, 2015 Author Posted June 11, 2015 Hi, Thank you for all of the responses given! It's much appreciated! The exact figure per unit isn't decided yet, it's my manager who makes that decision, I was instructed to just find as good a realistic price, so I'd say roughly between 300 - 450 ex VAT per unit, possibly more. tmcd - I've already contacted stone and got a quote from them, but i'll look into those other groups and see what they can offer. What I do know, is we're looking mainly for all in ones, or machines that come with a stand, to make the computer almost appear as an all in one. Oaktech - i7 sounds good, but we have mainly i5 processors here, and then I wonder, if the students notice a difference, would it lead to a preference in the room where they want to study for example...
WhizInTraining Posted June 11, 2015 Author Posted June 11, 2015 What do you need them to do? Are you a primary school looking for an ICT suite machine, or a Teacher desktop or a secondary school looking for a media suite machine? We're a college, and there's no specific purpose, these computers are just going to go in our common rooms, and our bookable rooms, but will mainly be used for just general research.
DPrince Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Yes, only ever work with ex-VAT figures. Agree that this is a good working figure then. As an independent, we have to add VAT on so I tend to look at the total price! I would tend to allocate a budget figure of about £500 for standard PCs, and increase by about 50% for anything 'special'.
Oaktech Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 I would never mix types of machines in a room for exactly that reason - tried it once, the kids literally destroyed the 3 core2duo machines remaining in a room of i5... If you are not bothered about them being spanking new, talk to @ICTDirect_Dave who will sell you lovely machines for next to no money... 1
ICTDirect_Dave Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 If you are not bothered about them being spanking new, talk to @ICTDirect_Dave who will sell you lovely machines for next to no money... Thank you sir! We can indeed get you some lovely machines for some fantastic prices. Aaaaaand we'll back them up with excellent 2/3/5 Year warranties Drop me a PM with your requirements and I'll put together a couple of options for you.
sonofsanta Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 i7s shouldn't be in a school at all, except perhaps in your machine, in your office, and only then if you're doing lots and lots of virtualisation and/or video editing. End users simply do not need them. If you're putting them into an IT Suite: Core i3, 8GB RAM, 120/128GB SSD. Will last you five years and more, if looked after by the tiny end users. If you need a media room - video editing, lots of Photoshop - go for Core i5 instead, but apart from that specific use case an i5 is overkill in a school. Even the future proofing argument is irrelevant, IMHO - the only difference between i3 and i5 is that the latter is a true quad core, and Microsoft Office is never going to be that heavily threaded, is it? If they're going into offices or at the front of classrooms: Pentium G3xxx, 4GB RAM, 120/128GB SSD. If all they're ever going to do is Internet + Office, this is plenty. We've just bought 154 of the latter with a five year warranty for well under £300 ex VAT a unit (in USFF cases). Stone, VeryPC and Novatech were all very competitive. I know VeryPC do a case that can mount the monitor to it, I suspect the others can do to. 22" 1080p monitors can be had for around £70 on top of that, perhaps. 4
tmcd35 Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 If you're putting them into an IT Suite: Core i3, 8GB RAM, 120/128GB SSD. I budget £450 all in and get the best deal under that I can for 'this years spec', which is pretty much as you put there. Rather than specify Core i3, I just say 'Quad Core' and see what I get. i3 with HT is fine. But then a Quad Core Celeron is plenty fast enough for 95% of our users. Interestingly the core price/spec for laptops has been the same as desktops for a few years now. I think you need to spec with half and eye to the future, 5 years is a long time, and the machines I bought 5 years ago really are starting to show their age (dual core AMD with 2Gb Ram). Windows 10 and Office 2016 are on the horizon and HTML5 is all but here. Multi-threading is more important to me than the latest greatest, fastest processor. I'd take a Quad Celeron over a Dual i3 any day. Strange sentence that, a couple of years a go I wouldn't have touch low end Pentium or Celeron with barge poll! 1
Oaktech Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 (edited) I'm in agreement with @sonofsanta here... We're a primary and i3/4gb/250gb is plenty for most tasks. I've got an older i7 with 8gb and our laptops are either i5 or i7 all supplied by ICT Direct. My last place was a federation of primary, secondary, sixth form and free school, nearly 3000 users and the only place i7's went was in the recording studio. Everywhere else was i3 or i5, with a few core2duo around with extra ram and an ssd for good measure. I would say there are better things to spend money on in education than super-duper-uber-computers. Servers, switches, sans and wireless for instance. LeEdit... I'd just like to point out that I've only got an i7 because it's a repurposed machine, in a previous life it was a (barely adequate) multipoint server. Edited June 11, 2015 by Oaktech 3
sonofsanta Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 I budget £450 all in and get the best deal under that I can for 'this years spec', which is pretty much as you put there. Rather than specify Core i3, I just say 'Quad Core' and see what I get. i3 with HT is fine. But then a Quad Core Celeron is plenty fast enough for 95% of our users. Interestingly the core price/spec for laptops has been the same as desktops for a few years now. I think you need to spec with half and eye to the future, 5 years is a long time, and the machines I bought 5 years ago really are starting to show their age (dual core AMD with 2Gb Ram). Windows 10 and Office 2016 are on the horizon and HTML5 is all but here. Multi-threading is more important to me than the latest greatest, fastest processor. I'd take a Quad Celeron over a Dual i3 any day. Strange sentence that, a couple of years a go I wouldn't have touch low end Pentium or Celeron with barge poll! I've done the "this is my budget, what can you build me" approach before, was surprised at what I got Personally I prefer higher clock speeds/IPC over threads at the moment - the promise of multi-threaded performance has still not arrived after years of promises, even in stuff like games, and Intel are stubbornly refusing to budge beyond "here's 4 cores and you'll like it" for all but the most ludicrously expensive of parts. The way I see it is: everything benefits from higher clock speed. Only a few things benefit from more threads. And given that the latter often comes at the expense of the former... When a PC is only doing Internet Explorer and PowerPoint, I'd rather save money in buying a dual core Pentium and get more PCs instead normally I'd always buy i3s and put them into the IT suites, then shuffle existing IT suite stock out (so that the best machines are always in the IT suites), but CPU improvements have been so slow in recent years it's not worth the effort. We got i3-550s 5 years ago, and we're just upgrading the last of them to 4GB RAM (from 2GB at the time) and an SSD, and they're still more than capable. We're only now replacing Core2Duos to be honest, though those really are creaking at 7 years old, especially where they weren't SSDed. A warning on those quad core Celerons: they're gussied up Atoms, and their single-thread performance is pretty dire. A Celeron G is a dialled down i3, without HyperThreading (same as the Pentium G) and slightly less cache than the Pentium. A Celeron/Pentium J is a clocked up Atom, built to be low power, and the instructions per clock is pretty dire. Compare the J1900 and the G1620 - similarly aged Celerons, where the former is a fancy Atom and the latter is a dialled-down i3 - and the latter is about twice as fast. 2 good cores is better than 4 naff cores in almost every situation.
tmcd35 Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 When a PC is only doing Internet Explorer and PowerPoint, I'd rather save money in buying a dual core Pentium and get more PCs instead normally I'd always buy i3s and put them into the IT suites, then shuffle existing IT suite stock out (so that the best machines are always in the IT suites), but CPU improvements have been so slow in recent years it's not worth the effort. A warning on those quad core Celerons: they're gussied up Atoms, and their single-thread performance is pretty dire. A Celeron G is a dialled down i3, without HyperThreading (same as the Pentium G) and slightly less cache than the Pentium. A Celeron/Pentium J is a clocked up Atom, built to be low power, and the instructions per clock is pretty dire. Compare the J1900 and the G1620 - similarly aged Celerons, where the former is a fancy Atom and the latter is a dialled-down i3 - and the latter is about twice as fast. 2 good cores is better than 4 naff cores in almost every situation. I tend to agree that CPU advances have been slow and end users tend not to need them at any rate. I'm seeing a lot of documents open - so web pages, powerpoint, word, etc. Not seeing anything that'll stress a CPU, certainly not single core or cache heavy applications. Based on this a Quad Pentium or a Dual i3 with HT are plenty, and I doubt you'd see a lot between them. Tends to be the SSD for real speed boosts, and the RAM. Turns out that Win7 and 2Gb is not a lot of fun. 4Gb is perfectly fine right now. 8Gb should be good for the next 5 years. It's not that individual apps don't support multi-threading - they generally don't need to. It's that users tend to have 5 or 6 apps open at once now, and so giving the OS options to manage those threads across multiple cores seems to make more sense to me. I'm actually starting to worry about HDD capacity again, long term, more than CPU performance. Now we've moved from HDD to SSD, drive capacity as shrunk from 500Gb-1Tb to 60Gb-120Gb. Is 120Gb enough space for apps long term? Are 240Gb SSD affordable? Probably the big question for next years spec? 2
sonofsanta Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 120GB has been fine up till now for us, but we're starting to have to monitor the IT suites for things like SCCM cache and stored profiles, as that's where the bigger installs go - CS5 is 10GB+, Visual Studio is 10GB+, Movie Studio Platinum is another big chunk... As and when I replace the PCs in those rooms, I'll probably go 240GB class--that's a couple of years yet though (servers next year), so hopefully they'll be even cheaper by then 240GB SSDs now are already down at the price of 120GBs a couple of years ago. Once V-NAND loses the Shiny New Tax, I expect that'll make capacity drives much cheaper to produce, and a theoretical Samsung 860 EVO will be a no-brainer.
Oaktech Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 With the interface hardware my machines have got, the increase in performance I'm seeing from SSD is not worth the cost of upgrades (last time I clocked one, 5 seconds on boot). I'm running 160-320gb conventional drives in most of my machines. The ram seems to be the thing that makes the day to day computing improvements.
DCUK6 Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 i say minimum of i3 for every situation these days. They are so cheap that you might as well and they will last a good number of years. I say SSD's are a must in new machines, everything is so much quicker to load. 120GB minimum, no data is stored on our drives and we have 60GB left on our 120s. No profiles are ever deleted on them. We dont have anything better than i3s for any of our workstations. Even mine is i3 and ive never felt as though i needed more. Only reason our new ones will be i5 is that they are refurbs. 3 years warranty is what your after especially on refurbs.
DSapseid Posted June 11, 2015 Posted June 11, 2015 Another vote for @ICTDirect_Dave refurbed one of my it suites at half term with i5 desktops for a fraction of the price it would have been. Machines run fantastic, teacher over the moon and now possibly looking to put ssd's in over the summer. 1
mthomas08 Posted June 12, 2015 Posted June 12, 2015 (edited) i7s shouldn't be in a school at all, except perhaps in your machine, in your office, and only then if you're doing lots and lots of virtualisation and/or video editing. End users simply do not need them. If you're putting them into an IT Suite: Core i3, 8GB RAM, 120/128GB SSD. Will last you five years and more, if looked after by the tiny end users. If you need a media room - video editing, lots of Photoshop - go for Core i5 instead, but apart from that specific use case an i5 is overkill in a school. Even the future proofing argument is irrelevant, IMHO - the only difference between i3 and i5 is that the latter is a true quad core, and Microsoft Office is never going to be that heavily threaded, is it? If they're going into offices or at the front of classrooms: Pentium G3xxx, 4GB RAM, 120/128GB SSD. If all they're ever going to do is Internet + Office, this is plenty. We've just bought 154 of the latter with a five year warranty for well under £300 ex VAT a unit (in USFF cases). Stone, VeryPC and Novatech were all very competitive. I know VeryPC do a case that can mount the monitor to it, I suspect the others can do to. 22" 1080p monitors can be had for around £70 on top of that, perhaps. Absolutely spot on. We have i5's for our Media areas and we are sticking to i3's everywhere else. The i3's are doing well considering they are not the worlds most powerful machines. And every time I see the "You get what you pay for" the next thing I think about is our 7-9 Year old machines that are slowing down beyond belief. That's the high spec and the low spec equipment (including our Macs). Can't stress how the 8-9 ones are starting to take forever to turn on and log on, no matter if they cost £350 or £1000 each. IT Equipment does age and will slow down and with limited budget I am considering sticking SSDs in the 7 Year old machines. We've tested a few and for a small cost you bring a new lease of life to the machines. Add on top of that imaging and Windows 7 which again gives them even more life when compared to NON Imaged Windows XP. I never did understand why people insist on spending far too much on PCs that are effectively used 60% of the time like a Tablet with Internet/Word. 95% of all our Department Software doesn't require any high spec machines, outside of Media only 1 PC requires punch and that's my Technicians machine due to what Software he is using. Edited June 12, 2015 by mthomas08
sonofsanta Posted June 12, 2015 Posted June 12, 2015 IT Equipment does age and will slow down and with limited budget I am considering sticking SSDs in the 7 Year old machines. We've tested a few and for a small cost you bring a new lease of life to the machines. We did exactly that a couple of years ago - our oldest machines were 5 year old HPs with Core2Duo E7400/E8400, and they were still working fine in low demand areas. Rather than replace 80 for ~£32k, we upgraded about 160 with SSDs for less than £10k. Because we only did staff machines, for cost reasons, we have some of those PCs with SSDs in and some with HDDs in. The difference is agonising--the HDD machines are all but unusable (to the point of student complaints), whereas the SSD machines are still soldiering on. I'm only replacing them now because I won't have another opportunity to until they're 9, and that'd have a knock on effect on the next oldest generation, and that is starting to push our luck too much. We'll be harvesting the SSDs we used in to upgrade and putting them out elsewhere, and by September we'll be an all SSD shop
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