On 13/07/15 11:55, whisky-dave wrote:
On Sunday, 12 July 2015 22:25:31 UTC+1, Adrian wrote:
On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 21:21:56 +0000, Huge wrote:

The intel core i5 Mac Mini I have on my desk (10g ram, 250gig SSD and
500gig HD, both internal) is not much bigger than a hardback book, if
that.

The vast majority of office desktop machines are hugely overpowered for
what they do.

They're also really quite cheap. Far cheaper than a Mac Mini.

We're getting 30 or so 'new' PCs for my lab, I'd like mac mini's or PC equiv. because of their small size and low power and low noise, but we'll probbaly be gettig the standard tower machines. One reason for getting them is cheapness, another is so they can be easily upgraded, but I'm betting the most important reason is because they are large relatively power hungry and pig ugly so no one will be tempted to nick them.


The Dell mini towers are my recommendation - you can spec those up to
ludicrous levels (32GB RAM, i7 CPU, 2 1TB SSDs) (but of course you can
be a lot more modest).

Not ugly, not large, not unecessarily tiny either and very quiet. Also
very reliable IME.