You do have a comeback if it’s a system less than 3 years old. In the us hp offers a 3 year next business day onsite warranty. I have purchased at least 100 of these from eBay over the years never had a single issue. Only a fool would overpay to waste time building. Your prices in the uk are either out of wack or you are not searching properly. No way you could build a machine in the us for anything close. The hp elitedesks are fantastic.
A i5-6500 can be had for 120 with 8gb of memory.
We always get ripped of in the UK. We were paying £100 for trainers you could buy in the US for $30 (around £20 at the exchange rate then), years ago.
Here's what I could price out new: Antec VSK-400B case: £34, BeQuiet Power 11 300W PSU: £42, Gigabyte 120GB SSD: £15, Gigabyte Ultra Durable H460 MB: £84, I5 10400: £170, 8gb 3200mhz memory (added to make it fair, I have some spare personally) Kingston Hyper Fury X £50 - Total= £395 + OS if you can't get it for free / don't have a spare copy on an old pc.
Here are a few UK ebay refurb companies re-sell deals for corporate pc's:
Searching for an i5 8500, bearing in mind it's 2 generations behind the i5 10400 specc'ed above, the refurbed ones range in the £300-400 price range in the majority:
Find great deals on eBay for i5 8500. Shop with confidence.
www.ebay.co.uk
I find it hard to justfiy a potentially well worn 2nd hand machine for only a few £'s difference from new, although I admittedly probably would spend another £10 on a better motherboard such as an MSI Bazooka if building myself. It will take me a long time to save to buy either, but I'd rather buy the spec for only slightly more.
That's just not so. Where do you get that idea?
If it was - the makers of such PCs would soon go out of business as the Corporates would switch to a more reliable source.
I've never known a fast good business machine, at least at the price range the companies I've worked for used to buy. Many companies buy in the £300-400 range and the reason why they're cheap is because the spec is cut right down compared to a home built gaming style pc. I build a home pc and it lasts usually around 10 years and never slows. I never have a problem or have to replace any component (apart from occcassional software glitch) once successfully built. The one I'm typing on now I built in Jan 2012 although it is beginning to show signs of it's age but after 9 years and 16hrs a day 7 days a week, for most of it's life, it owes me nothing. All the office pc's I've ever used including some good brands have been slow, frustrating and had to have repairs. I don't know why you think an office machine would be more reliable than a home built pc using quality components as the price alone prohibits the use of the same quality components such as a motherboard with 105 degree Jap Caps instead of Malaysian etc. and many business machines use custom designed motherboards as a result which are cut down to the bare bones in features and price. They're also often custom sized making any kind of upgrade impossible in the same chassis.
In 2012, as I had more money back then, I bought myself a £750 Dell Laptop with an i5 brand new at the same time as I built my desktop i7. My i7 used all the time as detailed above is still good albeit starting to fade after 9 very hard years. My i5 Dell Laptop, went from fast to slow in 12 months, despite hardly ever being out of the bag being used maybe a dozen times (no viurses or malware). I've wiped it and replaced the OS, put in an SSD but nothing I do makes it quick again, it's painful to wait for it to boot. Everything in it passes hardware / softwware tests. I mention above the experience above of the 2 brothers I knew who went in different directions - gaming vs business pc.
If you want to see inside a Dell, there's a memory replacement video here:
You can see the really cut down motherboard with CPU looking as if it's soldered directly and barebones memory. I doubt it runs xmp either which makes a noticeable difference as you stuck to 2600 no matter what speed you fit without xmp.
At the end of the day each to their own. If there was a massive price difference as there was until recently, then yes I'd say it might be worth buying a refurbed business machine pc as you don't need a gaming spec pc for running BI. However, with the drop in memory and SSD prices, in the UK with refurbs running in the £300-400 bracket for a 2 gen slower cpu than what you can build with for virtually the same price, I see no virtue in buying a cut down business machine, when for almost the same price plus an extra £10 on the motherboard I mentioned above, I can build with a top class Motherboard with quality power stage including Jap Caps, quality PSU, higher quality case etc and more upgradeability due to the use of standard sized replaceable parts. Each to their own choice though. I'm not saying my direction is the right one, just that price for price there's more of a choice now as refurbs aren't anywhere the same value as a year ago.
.....ha...
