[OPLINTECH] Public Workstation Upgrade

[Joe Knueven]

In the interest of brainstorming, a couple of questions with that configuration comes to mind.

First, do you have significant space limitations?  I ask, because while all in one systems have a slick visual appearance, they are more difficult to upgrade, and a 23” monitor combined with some manner of small form factor PC is liable to be cheaper and the monitor typically has a longer useful life than a PC.  (for instance, from what I’ve seen, monitors break far less frequently than hard drives and motherboards)

Second, what kind of tasks are your public working on?  Around here, they are primarily playing online games, working in online interfaces (for college or work or for social media), or once in a great while using an office program.  If your patron’s behavior is similar, you might find that it’s a better value proposition to trade an i5 for an i3 or even a fairly current generation Pentium processor in favor of the SSD.  With the SSD you see a performance boost in almost any activity whereas with the tasks I’ve described you will barely notice the difference between a Pentium and an i5 from the same generation.

The other thing worth considering, there are a few generations of the i-class processors at this point, and some of the most recent ones have very low power requirements.  It might be worth checking to see if you can get one of those to save on electric over the life of the system.
All that said, I think cpubenchmark is useful as described and 8 GB sounds like a good place to standardize on ram if you can afford to.

Have a good day and best of luck.

Joe


Joseph Knueven
Director
Germantown Public Library
51 N. Plum St.
Germantown, OH 45327
937-855-4001
joe at gtownlibrary.net

From: OPLINTECH [mailto:oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org] On Behalf Of Tim Burns
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 8:27 AM
To: oplintech at lists.oplin.org
Subject: [OPLINTECH] Public Workstation Upgrade

Dear Tech folks,

Please help “brainstorm” a configuration for the public workstations.

While I’m convinced that the future will not be anything like our current patron offering (witness most patrons spending their technology dollar$ on todays smartphone/tablet, the popularity of laptops as home computer selection, schools switching to 1:1 using Chromebooks, and more “cloud” - based computing than ever.) desktops are what our staff are used to. Not rock the boat today.

I’m looking for performance first. Performance comes from RAM, and CPU. Our new configuration should be 8GB of RAM, and quad-core (Intel i5 or better) processing/CPU. I use CPU Benchmarks to compare between various offerings of CPU. This levels the playing field by describing what a processor can do - given a specific task on similarly configured system. Here’s the site I’m looking at for comparison: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Generally, I want processing rating of 7000 or better as a starting point.

This machine is a starting point: https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Acer-Veriton-Z4820G-Wub-Core-i5-6500-3.2-GHz-8-GB-500-GB-LED-23.8in/4076440.aspx?enkwrd=4076440&pfm=srh

I’d prefer SSD drive (solid state) as there is a tremendous performance boost - and we don’t require a lot of storage on the public system. This model, being an all-in-one, includes larger (23+”) display and camera. Camera would be helpful as an image or document scanner alternative- would be available at each station.

Tim Burns
Birchard Public Library of Sandusky County Ohio

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