I’m looking for a new desktop for surfing, home accounts, music & photo storage (not ready to fully move to the cloud yet).
We don’t play games so doesn’t need to be super fast but decent graphics for photo editing would be nice.
Any recommendations for £500 budget?
Don’t need monitor or keyboard/mouse.
Thanks

Are you sure you want a desktop? If so I would look at the smaller units, an Intel NUC, Gigabyte Brix or Mac Mini type of thing. You can get lot of power in a small form factor these days and £500 should see you with an i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM easily enough.

e.g. amzn.to/1okyMUG

I paid £150 about 2 months ago for an ASUS Revo One with a monitor, and it needs about another £70 spending on 8GB of RAM and a 2TB drive. From Sainsburys’s, currently much cheaper if still in stock according to HUKD.com

?photo editing?

I’d bias that towards a £200 monitor, a reasonable AMD APU and a pair of big HDDs with a backup system.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a10-7890k-gaming-performance-benchmark,4491-5.html

7890 or 7870k? Built in graphics very useful, will accelerate some other tasks (Photoshop, transcoding), can do some gaming and will also allow a low end graphics card to be added later, where it can work together with the APU for a cheap gaming boost.

That article has some suggested components, and the Ars Technical or Tom’s Hardware budget builds will be great references too.

Thanks so far. I like the idea of a mini pc but need a CD/DVD drive for ripping music to mp3 or FLAC.
I’d also like something with a warranty in case of component failure.

photo editing?

Hobbyist dSLR photos or iPhone selfies?

I’d also like something with a warranty in case of component failure.

You’d be hard pressed to buy something new that didn’t have a warranty.

@Cougar – Hobbyist level. I have a Canon G16 that can shoot raw or jpg and occasionally like to play about with images but nothing too serious.

Re: warranty – good point.

I’ve bought several machines from EuroPC and they have all been good – worth considering. Some ebay sellers do refurbished Dell stuff as well – business machines often have the full 3 year warranty :

http://www.europc.co.uk/outlet/desktop-pc?limit=all