Question Switching to workstation desktop. What are top recommendations?

[wquartner]

Hello all -

I am looking to purchase a new, pre-built workstation desktop pc to replace my Dell XPS 15 (2018) laptop.

My budget is flexible, but I'm targeting ~$3k. I plan to use the computer for data analysis, heavy office use and photo editing. I am somewhat limited in physical desk space and so I have been considering a number of the small form factor options such as the HP Z2 Mini or Lenovo Thinkstation P330 SFF.

I would very much appreciate any advice on deciding between these two options, or recommendations if there is another model I should consider.

Also, I'd be curious to know opinions on whether buying a mini or Small form factor workstation defeats the purpose of switching to a desktop in the first place...I've listed the specs for my current computer (the xps 15) below. I'm hoping that by switching to a desktop workstation I can have faster performance and more reliable performance on tasks like working with very large data sets in excel. Thanks in advance!

Current Computer specs:
Processor: 8th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-8950HK Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.8 GHz, 6 cores)
Ram: 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2666MHz
GPU: NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 1050Ti with 4GB GDDR5
Storage: 1TB M.2 2280 PCIe Solid State Drive

 

[hang-the-9]

Size of desktop should not be a big issue with swapping from a laptop, main things are cost vs speed and upgrade ability. However you are already getting pretty much the top CPU and lots of RAM so your main reason to swap would be speed. You can of-course swap the motherboard and CPU and keep the rest of components also so that is an upgrade path if you wish to do that.