Buying New Desktop

CoastingHatbox

jamesd said:

That Celeron J4025 is an excellent fit for the tasks. It's from the November 2019 Gemini Lake Refresh desktop CPU series and has hardware decoding support for both HEVC and YouTube's latest mainstream production codec VP9. 4k video will fly for either of those, let alone mere 720p.

The RAM is just about adequate but it's not a good machine to buy because of the spinning hard disk. You should really be looking for SSD or other solid state storage and preferably 8GB of RAM, but solid state storage is more important than the extra RAM.

There are many different versions of the Celeron, i3, i5 and other names and it can take a little bit of research and shopping around to get a good choice, particularly when exact CPU model numbers can be hard to find. But don't buy without knowing - the oldest Celerons around wouldn't be the excellent match that this one is.

With all respect, I disagree. Benchmarks are only a broad guide, however:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J4025+@+2.00GHz&id=3668

And for comparison, I have one of these:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J3455+@+1.50GHz&id=2875

Lower base clock speed, but twice as many cores. I use it for some headless stuff, but I really wouldn't want to run full fat Windows on it and use it for a daily driver. I would happily run a lightweight Linux desktop on it, but unlike most people I default deny most scripts on websites and I don't tend to peruse many of the more expensive (CPU-wise) websites any way. For webapps like Facebook and for video calls (without hardware acceleration), that CPU would struggle.

It might sound ridiculous, but many websites shift the burden of rendering and processing to the client in order to increase the number of requests a given web server can simultaneously serve.

debitcardmayhem

CoastingHatbox said:

It might sound ridiculous, but many websites shift the burden of rendering and processing to the client in order to increase the number of requests a given web server can simultaneously serve.

All rendering is done on the client surely

CoastingHatbox

debitcardmayhem said:

CoastingHatbox said:

It might sound ridiculous, but many websites shift the burden of rendering and processing to the client in order to increase the number of requests a given web server can simultaneously serve.

All rendering is done on the client surely

In the beginning there was static HTML.
Then websites got dynamic, with server side scripting like PHP and classic ASP.
Then along came javascript (or ECMAScript) frameworks which popularised the idea of constructing web pages in the browser, rather than having the server work out what HTML should be transmitted to the client.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_rendering

debitcardmayhem

And as I said the rendering is done by a browser on the client side not by the server

CoastingHatbox

debitcardmayhem said:

And as I said the rendering is done by a browser on the client side not by the server

Still plenty of static and server-side rendered sites out there. In fact you can browse this forum with javascript disabled and it mostly works (only a few minor asthetics are broken).

For clarity, I'm talking about HTML rendering, not graphical rendering.

ann_droid

I think the important part is for the OP to save every month, avoid VERY, and then look at options in the open market.

This is after all MSE and not BenchmarksRUS.

Sandtree

CoastingHatbox said:

debitcardmayhem said:

And as I said the rendering is done by a browser on the client side not by the server

Still plenty of static and server-side rendered sites out there. In fact you can browse this forum with javascript disabled and it mostly works (only a few minor asthetics are broken).

For clarity, I'm talking about HTML rendering, not graphical rendering.

HTML is rendered on the client side, thats why you can "inspect" an element and adjust the CSS/attributes and the page layout changes. This is also how certain accessibility tools work by ignoring the rendering instructions in the CSS and applying their own.

PHP/ASP.Net etc generate HTML (and javascript) on the fly and send the output to the client for rendering.

There has always been the choice of doing some things client or server side and various pros/cons of each. The proliforation of certain standard javascript libraries like JQuery has meant that firstly the client doesnt need to download them each time because a local cached version can be used, they are maintained by third parties so doesnt give the site developer the overhead of ensuring the new Chrome update is still compatible and makes certain tasks a few lines of javascript rather than hundreds.

These may influence some decisions on if to do something client or serverside but given anything client side can be manipulated by the client there are certainly some things that should always be done on the server (eg calculate the value of a shopping basket for payment) 

jamesd

CoastingHatbox said:

jamesd said:

That Celeron J4025 is an excellent fit for the tasks. It's from the November 2019 Gemini Lake Refresh desktop CPU series and has hardware decoding support for both HEVC and YouTube's latest mainstream production codec VP9. 4k video will fly for either of those, let alone mere 720p.

The RAM is just about adequate but it's not a good machine to buy because of the spinning hard disk. You should really be looking for SSD or other solid state storage and preferably 8GB of RAM, but solid state storage is more important than the extra RAM.

There are many different versions of the Celeron, i3, i5 and other names and it can take a little bit of research and shopping around to get a good choice, particularly when exact CPU model numbers can be hard to find. But don't buy without knowing - the oldest Celerons around wouldn't be the excellent match that this one is.

With all respect, I disagree. Benchmarks are only a broad guide, however:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J4025+@+2.00GHz&id=3668

And for comparison, I have one of these:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J3455+@+1.50GHz&id=2875

Lower base clock speed, but twice as many cores. I use it for some headless stuff, but I really wouldn't want to run full fat Windows on it and use it for a daily driver. I would happily run a lightweight Linux desktop on it, but unlike most people I default deny most scripts on websites and I don't tend to peruse many of the more expensive (CPU-wise) websites any way. For webapps like Facebook and for video calls (without hardware acceleration), that CPU would struggle.

It might sound ridiculous, but many websites shift the burden of rendering and processing to the client in order to increase the number of requests a given web server can simultaneously serve.

You seem to have made a mistake with "without hardware acceleration" because that CPU has support for a very extensive range of modern codecs and the benchmark you used doesn't check or report that support or how well the hardware support performs.

For my day to day activities in Windows I've used a Chuwi Hi13 tablet with a Celeron N3450 CPU since 2017. Comparison with yours here: 
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-J3455-vs-Intel-Celeron-N3450/2875vs2907 Or all three https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-J3455-vs-Intel-Celeron-N3450-vs-Intel-Celeron-J4025/2875vs2907vs3668 .

The Chuwi gets the job done without any issues, after using its ports for suitable expansion, else I'd have changed it. Not as much modern video codec support in the hardware but it can handle the brief of our questioner without issues. Except: the Chuwi does have solid state storage, else it would suffer quite badly from swap issues. I agree with you about two cores making it slower but it's not being asked to do anything hard.

The key trouble here is the budget, which requires some major compromises. 

Ibrahim5

Our family has got a fleet of 6th generation i3s with 35w CPUs. Noctua fans. Samsung SSDs. Silent, energy efficient (whole PC with monitor amp speakers etc uses 40w). Cool never go over 30 degrees. Great for everyday use.

jamesd

I've done a bit more searching to find some other things you might consider.

One possibility is a tiny desktop computer, the £199  Chuwi LarkBox Pro Mini PC, 6GB RAM 128GB SSD (really the slower eMMC, has an SSD socket for expansion), Intel Celeron J4125, Windows 10, HDMI+DP 4K UHD, 2.4G/5G WIFI, BT 4.2, Dual Gigabit Ethernet, Four USB 3.0. The 4 core CPU is far faster in raw power than the two core you're looking at, compared to the others here. About 80% faster than my own and still with the excellent hardware video support. 6GB instead of 4GB of RAM is good and the 128GB storage is far, far better than the spinning hard disk. But no monitor, keyboard, mouse or DVD writer. Plenty of full HD monitors of that size for £99. Keyboard and mouse can be had for under £10 and DVD writers for £25. No installment plan but cheaper if you don't really need a new monitor, else not much more money.

Similar things for about the same price are available from several makers.