Budget 0-20k Basic PC for home-office

[agupta02]

I am planning to upgrade my Home-office PC. Budget is about 15-20k (the lesser the better) but I would like to buy one which should future proof me for atleast the next 2 years or so. Anyway I have come up with the following config along with the indicative cost:

Intel i3 (2120) (1155) - Rs.5990
Intel H61 BF Mobo - Rs.3790
4GB Corsair Vengence DDR3 RAM - Rs.2990
500GB HDD - Rs.2990

Majority of my usage is for word processing, spreadsheets, emails, skype (video chatting and presentations), youtube, making powerpoints, some light image editing work (resizing, cropping, scanning etc.) and maybe some lite gaming when I get some free time.

I would like advice on whether this config would serve my purpose? Also are the components chosen by me the best value for money or is it possible to buy something better in the same price range.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[vivek.krishnan]

Would suggest to go for a Haswell setup if possible. Also, you should have a look at the Pentium G2020 as well - should serve your needs - apart from the gaming part.

 

[agupta02]

I had considered G2020 initially but was told that it was very slow. I am more than happy to relook as it fits very nicely into my budget. There is a significant cost diff between i3 and g2020 but if there is a significant difference in perfomance as well I would like to stick with the i3. Please advise. Also can you tell me the components for the haswell setup and an approx cost?

 

[vivek.krishnan]

AFAIK, for most single basic productivity apps, G2020 and i3 are more or less the same. @Crazy_Eddy could throw more pointers.

 

[Crazy_Eddy]

Pentium Gs are architecturally similar to i3s (actually in this case the i3 2120 is Sandy bridge, and the G2020 is Ivy bridge). The missing features on the Pentium G are the AVX instruction set and hyper-threading.
The AVX instruction set is far too new to have already been implemented in office apps. There were some AVX benchmarks done on linux which showed mixed results : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_avx_gcc&num=1

I had considered G2020 initially but was told that it was very slow.

Who said this and did they provide any benchmarks or explanations? A lot of people see a 5% benchmark difference - mainly due to the lower clock speed on the Pentium G - and say oh its slow. But the bigger question is : if you're paying nearly double for the i3, is the performance also equally doubled? The answer is no.