Help me decide between 2 systems please

dn89lx

Member
Hello,

I have an expiring scholarship for my son and I must spend $500 by the end of June on a store bought PC. This will be replacing an 8ish year old desktop running Windows 7. While it still works, it can be slow when many browsers and Excel are being run and takes a while to boot up.

Anyway, I have narrowed down to these 2 systems, both cost $549 (I can pay the difference):

1. Best Buy - HP, Ryzen 5 3400G, 12GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, Wireless AC, BT 4.2

2. Office Depot - Lenovo, I5-9400, 8GB RAM + 16 GB Optane, 1TB 7200 RPM HDD, Wireless AC, BT 4.1

Really I think my biggest question is what will perform better - the 12GB RAM with SSD or the 8 GB RAM with the 16GB Optane and HDD.

Main use will be multi tasked web browsing, Excel, often large spreadsheet, Youtube on one screen, multi-tasking on the other and connecting to work, currently using Citrix. The AC wireless was important for me due to the location of the room in relation to the router. Thanks in advance.
 

ssal

Active Member
"Optane"!

Learned something new every day. I did a search on what's available and saw this

Intel 32GB Optane Series PCIe M.2 Memory Module

Is this a DRAM or SSD storage? I am a little confused.

If it is a dram, that it is a lot cheaper than than something like
CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Desktop Memory Model CMK32GX4M2B3200C16

If it is a SSD, than it is a lot more expansive than this
Samsung 1TB 970 EVO NVMe M.2 Internal SSD

So what is it? What's the advantage?
 

ssal

Active Member
Hello,

I have an expiring scholarship for my son and I must spend $500 by the end of June on a store bought PC. This will be replacing an 8ish year old desktop running Windows 7. While it still works, it can be slow when many browsers and Excel are being run and takes a while to boot up.

Anyway, I have narrowed down to these 2 systems, both cost $549 (I can pay the difference):

1. Best Buy - HP, Ryzen 5 3400G, 12GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, Wireless AC, BT 4.2

2. Office Depot - Lenovo, I5-9400, 8GB RAM + 16 GB Optane, 1TB 7200 RPM HDD, Wireless AC, BT 4.1

Really I think my biggest question is what will perform better - the 12GB RAM with SSD or the 8 GB RAM with the 16GB Optane and HDD.

Main use will be multi tasked web browsing, Excel, often large spreadsheet, Youtube on one screen, multi-tasking on the other and connecting to work, currently using Citrix. The AC wireless was important for me due to the location of the room in relation to the router. Thanks in advance.
Don't mean to steal you thread.

To answer you questions, I don't think the type of applications you outlined require too much of the processing power like games and video editing, so either machine is more than capable. The CPU on both are comparable. You can always upgrade to a 1-2 TB SSD (either SATA or Nvme) for a moderate sum.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
The Optane you're describing is a storage caching product. It is not RAM, and it is not a "SSD" in a traditional sense. It's targeted to accelerate performance of mechanical harddrives by increasing their caching size.
 

ssal

Active Member
The Optane you're describing is a storage caching product. It is not RAM, and it is not a "SSD" in a traditional sense. It's targeted to accelerate performance of mechanical harddrives by increasing their caching size.
So it will benefit the 2TB HDD at 7200 rpm that I have, right?
If I want to improve the performance of the 2TB storage, would I be better off with a 2TB SATA SSD?

The Optane will use up the only M.2 PCl slot I have on my mother board, right?
 

OmniDyne

Active Member
Really I think my biggest question is what will perform better - the 12GB RAM with SSD or the 8 GB RAM with the 16GB Optane and HDD.

The system with the SSD will perform far better, in every way.

Can you spare a bit more money? You'd be better served by something with an SSD and a 1TB HDD. A 128GB SSD will be sufficient.

So it will benefit the 2TB HDD at 7200 rpm that I have, right?
If I want to improve the performance of the 2TB storage, would I be better off with a 2TB SATA SSD?

The Optane will use up the only M.2 PCl slot I have on my mother board, right?

I wouldn't worry about Optane if I were you. I can't imagine it would benefit you in any noticeable way. It's one of those weird niche products.
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Yea... there's 3 types of "Optane" memory storage products out there. One of them is the caching m.2 drives that was mentioned previously. The other ones are Optane dram which is more geared towards large datacenter uses, and proper nvme Optane SSDs that have insanely low latency but also insanely expensive (which is also somewhat geared towards datacenter use).

I would not bother with those optane cache drives.
 
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