For a office / professional PC dont look at overclocking. Get a solid reliable machine that will not give any problems to your friend. I would say Ryzen is much better price to performance for productivity work. Still dont overclock the Ryzen system either. Your friend will not see any different in excel or word and would be getting annoyed if it crashed on him say once per month because it was overclocked.
It only us enthusiast PC users that enjoy their PC crashing and tinkering with settings to make it stable. Most people expect their PC to just turn on and always work. Xeons are not necessary because at standard speeds normal CPU's are very reliable.
I would look at a 1600X a solid brand PSU. Most MB are solid brands now but I have had problems with asus with AM4 myself. Samsung NVME 500G and however much spinning rust your friend needs. Don't pay a premium for 3200Mhz ram but get G.Skill memory preferable 2666MHz is usually very good value.
For video myself I would recommend an AMD RX 560. Even if you friend only ever uses windows the option to go to linux would mean built in open source video drivers in the kernel for a headache free experience.
When I saw cpa my first thought was intel. Honestly as an AMD guy I don't know enough of the product line-up to give informed advice other the the most general. I am surprised he is not going with a Dell lease just for the tax write-off.
Very true points. No One wants to upgrade to a slower machine. But if it's a workstation or as in this instance a professional office productivity machine it has to be turn on and work not crash machine.
Hence I thought Ryzen 1600x ... Fast but cheap. More threads than could ever be lacking. A dedicated GPU whether AMD or Nvidia will blow away an APU.
It still needs to be a solid 24/7 machine so stock speeds but great parts.
That would ruin any dell, HP or Microsoft attempt at hardware and fail.
The Ryzen 5 1600 comes with a "Thermal Solution: Wraith Spire Cooler". It is actually quite decent.
I would not bother with an aftermarket cooler unless you are willing to do an AIO or Noctua and also want to overclock.
The X370 chipset is more for enthusiast/crossfire builds. AMD does not segment their products like Intel so a B350 chipset mobo would still support ECC RAM and would likely be a better idea overall for normal single-gpu setups.
For the form factor, in another month or so, ITX AM4 mobos should become more readily available. Currently, the smallest readily available form factor is micro-ATX AM4 and opting for one could allow you to build in a smaller case.
Appearance matters a lot to overall longterm satisfaction with a build. Make sure to get a case they will like or maybe have them pick it.
For reliability, ECC ram with an nvme drive is just weird. If you really want reliability, get 2 SATA SSDs and use RAID1. If you prefer performance, drop ECC RAM and get higher clocked RAM. ECC RAM with a single NVME means you don't really care about reliability. NVME with ECC means you don't really care about performance either. So which is it? That configuration will work, but it seems a bit "confused" or perhaps "unfocused."
There are plenty of B350 motherboards that disable ECC support in their UEFI so you need to make sure that you purchase one with ECC support enabled. Most (all?) X370 boards support it, though.
i didnt realize ryzen had decent cpu cooler thank you!
So what should i do with memory and storage? kinda scared of raid/dont know anything. Just want fast reliable parts. Was suggested ecc so i went with that and that was the highest speed i could get. also mobo only does 2666
A 4-core APU would drop the cpu price by half, and allow leaving out the video card but would require a larger micro-atx sized case for a better cpu cooler.
Remember to buy stuff from Jet. They are basically a proxy for other sellers (like Newegg) and you can get a 15% discount instead of ordering directly from newegg.
i think raid is out of my league unfortunately. Whats wrong with getting a m.2 nvme or regular m.2 for os and program and some files and having ecc? if i get m.2 nvme or regular m.2 should i get different ram if so why?
You can get it if you want. I am not saying it is bad just "unfocused" since performance and reliability tend to be on opposite ends. NVME SSD is performance oriented and ECC ram is stability oriented. They should work normally together.