Pre-Built Machines

What's people's views on pre-built computers nowadays?

My Shuttle XPC cube, which I built in 2018, is now getting on a bit and I'm considering my options for upgrades in the future. It still works perfectly though, and none of its proprietary components have failed in all that time.

I've been looking at business-oriented machines from Dell/HP/Lenovo etc as they seem to have some good options. For example, if you want a tiny computer, you can get miniature ones like the HP EliteDesk models which use ordinary Core i CPUs and have room for a proper HDD/SSD.

HP's "Z" series workstation machines also look really good, with elegant case designs, plenty of internal and external drive bays, and plenty of PCIe slots. Some have traditional tower cases, others have small desktop cases with room for some drive bays, and others are miniature types, similar to the office machine above.

Looking at people's comments about these on the internet, it seems they are really good machines. And the advantage for people like me, my i5-8500 system from 2018 is now sufficiently old that I could pick up a second hand HP Z4/Z6 or similar with a considerably newer i7 (or equivalent Xeon), for not much money :).

The 8th Gen and earlier mini machines seem to sell for peanuts now so look like excellent options if you need any spare machines for basic tasks. I was pondering picking one up to use as a kind of media centre.

If I were getting a desktop/tower machine, expandability is key for me. My Shuttle is currently jam packed with hardware - a Quadro graphics card, a SAS card, an NVME SSD, a Blu-Ray RW drive, a 4TB IronWolf HDD, an old 1TB Barracuda HDD which I reinstated because I needed more space, and there's a random SATA SSD crammed in there too! Its amazing how much you can fit in such a machine, and yet many "gaming" machines on the market seem to contain a lot of RGB coloured fresh air!

Of course buying a new/used Workstation/Office machine isn't essential. I still have my old aluminium Lian-Li case, which I bought new old stock in 2010 (probably an early 2000s model), and that could easily take a modern ATX mobo.

Pre built machines serve their purpose. With a pre configured standard PC build though I'm always looking to see what areas they have tried to use budget parts to cut corners to reduce costs as they always have somewhere. For a full sized PC I would always build it myself.

The office business machines you mention such as HP and Lenovo are OK for what they are. At work we have them as office workstations and they just carry on working for years asat in a busy warehouse style environment. They are robust, often with metal cases, and go on forever, but they are fairly generic spec and design. The only issue they have is fairly small cases so they don't have much room for airflow.

The small systems that interest me the most these days are the really small systems from companies such as Geekom and Acer. Often using laptop versions of APUs so they can cope with the far smaller form factor. For Linux the AMD Ryzen CPUs are perfect, but you can get them with an i8 squeezed in. They normally come with a lot of ports and support for a couple of M2 HDDs and often one 2.5" SSD. And they are not much bigger than a RPi4 case which is quite mad. And you can get the lower spec ones for around 200 pounds. The problem I have with them is too many models and configurations. You start to compare them and 3 hours later are still no closer to working out which has the best bang for your buck.