Not all employees need or want laptops. If you’re in the market for desktop PCs for your company—whether a handful or a whole fleet—start with our buying advice and top-rated product recommendations. We’ll help you maximize your PC-buying ROI.
Everyone needs a PC, especially at work. Email, Twitter, chat apps, the web: All of these technologies keep today’s businesses humming. It might be tempting to buy a simple consumer PC from a big-box store like Best Buy or Walmart for your startup, but you’ll be doing yourself and your customers a disservice if you do. Specialized business PCs have extra features that make them better suited to the office than the $300 sales-circular special. For one, business desktops are built to last longer, and are easier to service than consumer PCs. After all, the longer a business PC is down, the more money it costs you in lost earning time. Business PC makers may have specialized tech-support lines to help you troubleshoot your hardware meltdown or your QuickBooks problem. At the very least, you can add a service contract to your business PC so that onsite support calls are handled by techs who respond in hours rather than in the days or weeks most consumer tech-support turnaround takes. (Photo: Charles Jefferies) Core, Ryzen, or Xeon? Assessing CPUs Dual- and quad-core processors, particularly in the Intel Core i3 and Core i5 lines, are the norm in business PCs. Celeron and Pentium dual-core CPUs are found in lower-priced desktop PCs, and use technology trickled down from the higher-end Intel Core processor line, but we’d look to the higher-spec Core chips instead of these. Consider buying a slightly more powerful processor if you’re concerned about keeping your system for a lengthy useful life. Faster CPUs are a must for today’s attention-challenged, multitasking PC users. Core i5, Core i7, Core i9, or Xeon CPUs are prime options for users like graphic artists, hard-core number crunchers, and other gearheads who stress over the speed of their PCs. Much less common among business machines, but also viable options, are desktops based on AMD’s Ryzen and Ryzen Pro CPUs. (See our deep-dive guide to today’s desktop processors.) (Photo: Zlata Ivleva) As for memory, look for absolutely no less than 8GB of RAM. An 8GB loadout is really the floor in new systems and the sweet spot nowadays that most users should insist on as a minimum. In general, the more memory you can get the better, especially for people who work in graphic design and web development—they will need no less than 16GB. More memory allows you to do two things: open up more programs and windows at once, and perform multimedia processes (like editing photos) faster. Less than 8GB is suitable only for an occasional-use desktop that won’t be tasked with running more than one program at a time. Storage: SSD or Hard Drive? You’ll always see exceptions, but business PCs often require less storage than consumer PCs, since you’re less likely to use them to sync your iPhone or to house your personal video collection. Unless you’re a pro content creator, many of the key day-to-day files you or your users access will tend to be housed on common servers, and business folks may well spend much of their time in cloud services for key operations. Even so, since storage is so inexpensive these days, you might be tempted to think that a hard drive with around 500GB of space strikes a good balance between economy and space. Frankly,60GB of available storage could be enough for just about all the PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents you use on a day-to-day basis, especially if your office uses a network to house (and thus back up) files. And that leads us to why you should opt for an SSD boot drive instead, in most cases. Compared with traditional hard drives, solid-state drives (SSDs) fetch you less capacity per dollar. But an SSD-only system will boot and launch programs almost as quickly as your phone does. A 256GB SSD should be sufficient for office workers‘ needs, today and for the near future, even if it costs a little more than a machine with a traditional hard drive. Larger SSDs,512GB or 1TB in capacity, are speedy options for power users, but these upgrades will boost your per-unit purchase price. That said, a small-capacity SSD is far preferable to a large, slower hard drive whose capacity your office users will never fill. (Photo: Zlata Ivleva) Optical drives are less critical for consumer PCs these days, but a DVD burner still may be a useful addition to a small-business PC. You may need it to burn copies of projects for your clients, or to read the occasional CD or DVD that’s either sent to you by a supplier or customer or that contains important records or files from several years ago. Most PCs won’t come with these drives anymore, but watch for models that include them if you need them. It will probably be a checkbox item, not standard. Graphics: The Basics Usually Suffice Most business PCs come with an integrated graphics processor (IGP)—that is, video capabilities that are built into the central processor.
