best desktop for £1,000 (or less)

stripey

Member
Well, it's built ! In the end specifications changed and this is what we ended up with, and why...

Asrock Fatality motherboard (mini-ITX)
Ryzen 5 2400G CPU with inbuilt Radeon Vega graphics
8GB of memory (2x 4Gb 3200 DDR 4)
256 Gb M2 drive
interchangeable 120 Gb SSD
ASUS DVD writer
5.25 inch docking bay that can hold one hot swappable SSD and one 3.5" HDD
Windows 10 Pro as the main OS

The Ryzen 5 2400G CPU is proving quite up to all the tasks we are asking of it - we decided that a separate graphics card just wasn't needed for our applications.
 
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stripey

Member
The task now is to install the different OS on different discs. It didn't quite go according to plan first time around...

Attempt 1.

* Win 10 Pro installed on the M2 drive. No problems there.
* Manjaro Linux installed on an interchangeable 120 Gb SSD.

Unfortunately Manjaro installed the GRUB bootloader on the M2 drive. If the SSD containing Manjaro wasn't physically present in the computer, Windows wouldn't boot. If the Manjaro SSD was present then we had about 2 seconds to interrupt the boot sequence and select Win 10. Most times we weren't fast enough. So now we are on attempt 2.

Attempt 2

* Win 10 installed on an interchangeable SSD
* Nothing at all on the M2 drive

We're thinking the next step will be to install Linux (PureOS or Manjaro) on a second SSD - if we can figure out how to ensure it won't install its boot loader to the M2 drive
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
As you're probably aware, since the forums belong to PC Specialist, it's not possible to advice on non-PCS systems. But best of luck :)
 
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