My production PC was a fairly vanilla Intel NUC. I’ve covered NUC PCs (new unit of computing) here before. They are very small form-factor PCs measure just 4 inches square and a bit less than 2 inches tall, at least for the models I have. I’ve been using one for a couple of years now, and for the most part, it served my needs well. At least it did until very recently.
I’m a big fan of TechSmith’s software. I use SnagIt very frequently to do screen grabs and edit them. And I use the vendor’s Camtasia as well application to record video, especially video meetings and demos. I recently upgraded to the latest versions of each. Updating SnagIt presented no problem, but when I went to install the latest version of Camtasia, I got an error message that told me that I didn’t have enough RAM installed in my PC to do the installation.
Camtasia now requires 32GB of RAM to even install the software, and I had only 16MB of RAM in my current configuration. While I could probably get away with just using the older version of the software, the warning about insufficient RAM was a wake-up call. But deciding on how to approach a several years old hardware configuration presented some hard decisions. If past history is any indication, new and updated applications that I use, or might want, are probably going to need more in the way of hardware resources, not the same or less.
Build it out?
There are a few ways to go if you feel your current hardware setup is lacking the horsepower that your “official” office PC provided, or that you need given the current circumstances. In my case, the choice was pretty cut-and-dry — either upgrade the RAM or upgrade my entire PC.
The particular NUC PC I had been using has two slots on the motherboard for SO-DIMM RAM sticks. But this particular model only supports a maximum of 32GB of RAM. Just a few years ago, 32GB of RAM was plenty. That’s not the case anymore. A set of two 16GB SO-DIMM sticks runs about $150. And putting that much money into a several-year-old PC seems to be a stop-gap measure, at least in my case.
As I was pondering the best way to go about attacking the problem, it solved itself. ASUS sent me one of their new PN50 mini-PCs to test. The PN50 is just a tad larger than an Intel NUC, but this particular model is powered by an AMD 4000 series Ryzen mobile CPU and has onboard Radeon Vega 7 graphics, which more than meet my requirements for image and video editing. Internally it can support up to 64GB of RAM, and two SSDs — an M.2 stick-style SSD of up to 512GB, and a 2.5-inch form-factor SSD of up to 1TB. My test PC had all three, as well as Windows 10 Pro, and priced out at about $850 when the Zinstall migration software is figured in. I have a three-monitor setup, which the PN50 easily supports at 4K (it will actually support four 4K displays if I had a larger desk), and if I ever upgrade to 8K resolution on the displays, it will support three of these. For a small PC, it has a lot of ports including several USB-C ports, and a DisplayPort dual-mode port which can support two displays in addition to the dual HDMI ports.
In benchmark testing, the little PC that could offered performance in the range of a high-end Intel core i7 system. In the same configuration, a similar system from Dell, HP, or Lenovo, not quite as small in size, would probably price out at a few hundred dollars more, especially when system migration software, such as Zinstall or LapLink, is figured in. Not surprisingly, the PN50 is now my production PC, with the former i5 NUC relegated to backup status. A few-hour session with my favorite migration software, Zinstall, and I was up and running, with the newest version of Camtasia easily humming along.
What about the rest of your hardware?
I’m the first person to acknowledge that I’m extremely lucky — I get a lot of hardware to review, so figuring out what kinds of upgrades will produce the results I need is fairly easy. But upgrading to an entirely new PC is not a snap decision. In this economy and circumstance, dropping a thousand dollars or more on a new PC, and then more money on migration software, is going to be a difficult choice. It really boils down to what kind of performance and capability do you now need from your hardware, and what will you need over the next several years.
In many cases, new hardware is going to make a lot of sense. Replacing a hard drive with a large SSD means buying a new copy of the OS, migration software to move all of your files and applications to the new drive, and possibly adding more RAM. That’s going to be a substantial expense. And at the end, you’re still stuck with a core PC with several years-old technology for the most part.
But if you’re going to continue to operate from home (at least part of the time, which seems to be likely), is the rest of your hardware and software up to the task? For many of us, upgrading our internet capability as well as the network in our home, is going to be another decision and expense that might make a lot of sense. I had gigabit internet and a high-speed mesh network in place before the lockdown, so I’m in pretty good shape. But a lot of the newer equipment in my home is capable of Wi-Fi 6, so upgrading my mesh network is something I’m mulling over. As with many of you, I’ve got multiple heavy on-line users in the house, so squeezing out the most from our equipment and internet service is a must.
And I haven’t even started to talk about upgrading your print capability — that’s a topic for next time.
