KitGuru Complete Guide to Buying a Workstation

1. Introduction2. Test Hardware3. Test Software Packages4. Summary5. View All Pages

So there you have it: The baseline to KitGuru's complete guide to buying the best workstation for your needs.

While we will be stressing ‘value for money' at every stage, that doesn't mean that there has been any compromise in the hardware chosen. In terms of pricing, the range of choices tested start with a Core i7 5820K system and an nVidia K620, which will set you back just over £1,000 – right through to a high end Xeon with a Quadro K5200 that will be pushing the £5,000 mark.

What we want to make sure is that, if you are in the market for a professional workstation (something that you will be using to do work that will be invoiced to a client), then you are certain that your budget has been spent in the right place. This is the kind of analysis that F1 teams do 365 days of the year. Within the parameters of weight and performance, where should we put our focus?

As the series develops, we will be putting more and more topics under the microscope as we present the most comprehensive set of workstation tests that we have ever assembled.

We hope you find the series enjoyable and a useful tool for your purchasing decisions. As we expand the series in the future, we're hoping that you find it an invaluable reference, but at the same time we are always keen to get feedback from our audience.

Let us know what you think over on Facebook, and read on for Part 2 where we perform some initial testing and draw some early conclusions.

KitGuru says: We are brand agnostic. The choices that we investigated with PC Specialist could just as easily have been investigated with a different system builder.  The important part is that the systems chosen formed a ‘Reference Platform' for our tests that remained constant in the two days that we were Up North. The exact results you get from another workstation manufacturer will be slightly different, but the ‘performance ratios' between each platform will remain similar.

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