Intel NUC (skull Canyon) recommend for workstation with heavy processing power
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I am in task in searching for a workstation for our accounting team. They run a lot of data base reports, and compile invoices (I don't know much about it). Pricing is subjective but it should not cost "too much". Yes, that is a direct quote from the accounting manager. Our average system is about $500-$600, but with i5 4th gen, 4GB, 500GB.
Specs that they want are
i5/i7 Quad core 4th gen+
16GB (didn't say what DDR or core speed)
200GB storage+ SSD
Gigabit network (would be harder to find one without gigabit port)They are looking into Dell, HP, and other prebuilt system. I told them to look into custom built, but they complain about warranty.
I know about Intel NUC kit but would anyone recommend it for workstation that deal with a lot of database reports?
Also, does all M.2 utilize PCI-E 3.0 bus or it must be specified on motherboard? -
You are not going to see the $600 price point from any vendor with an SSD installed or with that RAM.
I personally prefer the Dell Opiplex micro model now.
From dell, that is the best business machine you will find with an i5.Generally I order the base line 9020m (looks like they moved to 7040 now). Then I order memory and/or SSD separate and drop them in.
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@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
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@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
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@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
interesting note. Have you done this before with the after market upgrade, and ran into problem with either manufacturer or policy?
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@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
interesting note. Have you done this before with the after market upgrade, and ran into problem with either manufacturer or policy?
I have never had a problem. I make my life easier in that I run the Dell diagnostic tool prior to calling tech support so that I can say here is what the tool said.
I have never even had a rep say anything about having 3rd party hardware.
Again a BSoD issue is almost certainly not SSD related. If the Dell tool tested the memory bad, then swap it and don't call Dell.
Generally BSoD are due to the OS or drivers in my experience, not hardware.
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@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
interesting note. Have you done this before with the after market upgrade, and ran into problem with either manufacturer or policy?
I have never had a problem. I make my life easier in that I run the Dell diagnostic tool prior to calling tech support so that I can say here is what the tool said.
I have never even had a rep say anything about having 3rd party hardware.
Again a BSoD issue is almost certainly not SSD related. If the Dell tool tested the memory bad, then swap it and don't call Dell.
Generally BSoD are due to the OS or drivers in my experience, not hardware.
Do you replace the original drive with the SSD or clean the original drive and make it as back up?
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I still want to know, or get feedback on the Intel NUC as workstation. I know skull canyon is not yet being released, but it is the only one with quad i7. With the pricing and whatnot... I want to favor M.2 if it utilize PCI-E bus.
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@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
interesting note. Have you done this before with the after market upgrade, and ran into problem with either manufacturer or policy?
I have never had a problem. I make my life easier in that I run the Dell diagnostic tool prior to calling tech support so that I can say here is what the tool said.
I have never even had a rep say anything about having 3rd party hardware.
Again a BSoD issue is almost certainly not SSD related. If the Dell tool tested the memory bad, then swap it and don't call Dell.
Generally BSoD are due to the OS or drivers in my experience, not hardware.
Do you replace the original drive with the SSD or clean the original drive and make it as back up?
I just put in the new drive and install clean. The original drive goes into a pile awaiting use in a user desktop in the future if they have a failure.
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Do they need to do the 'work' on the desktop? Why isn't that happening on a DB server?
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@Dashrender Please explain.
I am more or less forbidden to touch anything related to accounting so I know very little of their infrastructure. The order came directly from CEO as we ran into "issue" in the past and cause our accounting dept to go cripple for 2 days. This affect everyone paychecks. As you can imagine... there are many unhappy people caused by the incident.
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@LAH3385 said:
@Dashrender Please explain.
I am more or less forbidden to touch anything related to accounting so I know very little of their infrastructure. The order came directly from CEO as we ran into "issue" in the past and cause our accounting dept to go cripple for 2 days. This affect everyone paychecks. As you can imagine... there are many unhappy people caused by the incident.
Sounds like they need to find a way to rely less individual end user devices, and the ability to work anywhere on anything.
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@Dashrender said:
@LAH3385 said:
@Dashrender Please explain.
I am more or less forbidden to touch anything related to accounting so I know very little of their infrastructure. The order came directly from CEO as we ran into "issue" in the past and cause our accounting dept to go cripple for 2 days. This affect everyone paychecks. As you can imagine... there are many unhappy people caused by the incident.
Sounds like they need to find a way to rely less individual end user devices, and the ability to work anywhere on anything.
I still not sure where you are heading with DB server. If it sound good, and improve reliability I want to present the solution to the accounting Manager. He might be looking for a new platform as well as we both know there are little redundancy, if any, in the current setup.
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Well, we'd need to know more about what system you're using for accounting before we can really talk about it.
What caused the outage and missed payroll last time?
My accounting person has a PC, but I can move them to another computer where they will have access to all of their files and install a front-end for the accounting package, printers etc in under 1 hour.
Sadly we aren't looking to move to a fully web hosted/based solution so that all she needs is a web browser, but as I said, I can get her up and running on a completely different machine in 1 hour.
Why couldn't you (or whomever) do that for your accounting person/department?
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@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@JaredBusch We just upgrade 20 Vostros with Optiplex 3020, aftermarket with 8GB ram. Problem with that, according to Dell account rep, is the SSD upgrade. I told him of the plan, and he told me that Dell has no problem with after market. The only problem is the warranty. Warranty only cover what is shipped from the warehouse. So if anythign happens I have to remove all after market components and replace them with factory shipped components. This make any BSOD a self diagnostic. Beside.. I highly doubt I will find anything with the requested spec for less than $700 prebuilt.
I have never had a problem with Dell sending out replacement parts when the Dell diagnostic tool reported a problem that was not SSD/memory related.
BSoD is wipe and reinstall anyway.
interesting note. Have you done this before with the after market upgrade, and ran into problem with either manufacturer or policy?
Never had an issue. In the US and in most of the world it is illegal to not honour a warranty like that. So it would never come up.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to run the accoutning applications (would need more details here) as a VM? Would give you a lot of room to maneuvre, while giving you a chance to get some redundancy, as well as let your accounting work from any workstation.
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@ardeyn said:
Wouldn't it make more sense to run the accoutning applications (would need more details here) as a VM? Would give you a lot of room to maneuvre, while giving you a chance to get some redundancy, as well as let your accounting work from any workstation.
This really depends on how the software works. If it's all desktop based stuff - then running in a VM would require VDI licensing assuming he's using Windows based workstations.
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@Dashrender said:
Well, we'd need to know more about what system you're using for accounting before we can really talk about it.
What caused the outage and missed payroll last time?
My accounting person has a PC, but I can move them to another computer where they will have access to all of their files and install a front-end for the accounting package, printers etc in under 1 hour.
Sadly we aren't looking to move to a fully web hosted/based solution so that all she needs is a web browser, but as I said, I can get her up and running on a completely different machine in 1 hour.
Why couldn't you (or whomever) do that for your accounting person/department?
Our accounting use SAGE 50 application. Sage 50 is configured to have service side, where all data are stored and clients side, where users would login into server data. The problem last time caused from something messed up the pathing to the server. I don't know much about it since it happened long before I joined the company.
@ardeyn said:
Wouldn't it make more sense to run the accoutning applications (would need more details here) as a VM? Would give you a lot of room to maneuvre, while giving you a chance to get some redundancy, as well as let your accounting work from any workstation.
It was not outage. it was messed up in the configuration itself. I don't know what happened. There was no documentation about it. I know this because the accounting manager told me the story.
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@LAH3385 said:
@Dashrender said:
Well, we'd need to know more about what system you're using for accounting before we can really talk about it.
What caused the outage and missed payroll last time?
My accounting person has a PC, but I can move them to another computer where they will have access to all of their files and install a front-end for the accounting package, printers etc in under 1 hour.
Sadly we aren't looking to move to a fully web hosted/based solution so that all she needs is a web browser, but as I said, I can get her up and running on a completely different machine in 1 hour.
Why couldn't you (or whomever) do that for your accounting person/department?
Our accounting use SAGE 50 application. Sage 50 is configured to have service side, where all data are stored and clients side, where users would login into server data. The problem last time caused from something messed up the pathing to the server. I don't know much about it since it happened long before I joined the company.
@ardeyn said:
Wouldn't it make more sense to run the accoutning applications (would need more details here) as a VM? Would give you a lot of room to maneuvre, while giving you a chance to get some redundancy, as well as let your accounting work from any workstation.
It was not outage. it was messed up in the configuration itself. I don't know what happened. There was no documentation about it. I know this because the accounting manager told me the story.
Sage systems are horrible. They have silly client side things a lot of times.
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@JaredBusch said:
@LAH3385 said:
@Dashrender said:
Well, we'd need to know more about what system you're using for accounting before we can really talk about it.
What caused the outage and missed payroll last time?
My accounting person has a PC, but I can move them to another computer where they will have access to all of their files and install a front-end for the accounting package, printers etc in under 1 hour.
Sadly we aren't looking to move to a fully web hosted/based solution so that all she needs is a web browser, but as I said, I can get her up and running on a completely different machine in 1 hour.
Why couldn't you (or whomever) do that for your accounting person/department?
Our accounting use SAGE 50 application. Sage 50 is configured to have service side, where all data are stored and clients side, where users would login into server data. The problem last time caused from something messed up the pathing to the server. I don't know much about it since it happened long before I joined the company.
@ardeyn said:
Wouldn't it make more sense to run the accoutning applications (would need more details here) as a VM? Would give you a lot of room to maneuvre, while giving you a chance to get some redundancy, as well as let your accounting work from any workstation.
It was not outage. it was messed up in the configuration itself. I don't know what happened. There was no documentation about it. I know this because the accounting manager told me the story.
Sage systems are horrible. They have silly client side things a lot of times.
totally agree with you there. Any recommendation?
