Question Any need to upgrade to i5 for normal office work?

[drosehill]

I'm currently looking at making some upgrades to my three year old build. I did it on a budget and it was my first one, but it has served me really well.

My current components:

• Motherboard — Asus H110M-K
• Processor — Intel® Core™ i3-7100 Processor
• RAM — 16GB

I use it exclusively for office work — with occasional photo editing and very occasional lightweight video editing.

I definitely want to upgrade to 24GB RAM because — somehow — after a long day of work with many tabs open I find that I am maxing out (there are only two RAM slots and the capacity is 36GB, so I'll have to swap out a 16GB stick with an 8GB one).

I feel like I should upgrade the CPU too while I'm tinkering just to future-proof it a little (I'm thinking I'll build again in a couple more years). But I don't notice any particular performance lags and am wondering if i3 is good enough for this use case for at least a couple more years?

Video rendering is a little bit slow, but I do it so infrequently that it's not bothersome. Overall, besides when the RAM maxes out, I've been extremely happy (and productive!) with it.

Are there any other reasons to upgrade or is it feasible to be totally content doing a lot of work on an i3-based rig?

 

[jay32267]

Here's the thing....if

>>>"But I don't notice any particular performance lags "

Then I think it's probably fast enough.

In general....office work isn't very CPU intensive.

Where I work we are running i5-2400s....which is close in performance to your i3....and they are fine for office work.

 

[drosehill]

Where I work we are running i5-2400s....which is close in performance to your i3....and they are fine for office work.

Interesting!

Yeah, it feels kind of somehow wrong being satisfied with a humble i3 when most of the build-your-PC community are building gaming rigs with much more sophisticated hardware!

But I guess if it ain't broke, there isn't a reason to fix it.

 

[jay32267]

Interesting!

Yeah, it feels kind of somehow wrong being satisfied with a humble i3 when most of the build-your-PC community are building gaming rigs with much more sophisticated hardware!

But I guess if it ain't broke, there isn't a reason to fix it.

I am running DOS machines from the early 1990s to run alternator testers and I haven't upgraded them because THEY WORK. So there you go.

 

[drosehill]

I am running DOS machines from the early 1990s to run alternator testers and I haven't upgraded them because THEY WORK. So there you go.

That's awesome.

I also run a lightweight Linux distribution on the desktop (Lubuntu) so I guess that helps a lot too.

 

[512-Bit]

No, you don't.
As long as your work isn't fairly CPU intensive, that 7100 will be fine.