Are desktops better than laptops1/28/2024 Other components that are easy to replace in a tower PC, but not in an all-in-one, include the optical drive, speakers, wireless adapters, and ports of all sorts. You may be able to have it serviced, but the cost will be several times the price of a brand new monitor. With an all-in-one, though, a broken display makes the entire system worthless. Just buy a new one, plug in the cord, and you’re good. A broken monitor sucks if you have a tower PC, but it’s easy to replace. The result is a sleek PC that’s hampered the moment any major component dies. Everything in the system is designed just so to make sure it can work together within a limited footprint. Poor upgradability also means poor reparability. When something goes wrong, it all goes wrong Upgrading means entirely replacing these components, which is more expensive and more of a hassle than adding additional a new hard drive or RAM an existing tower setup. Most AIO systems ship with two RAM slots and a single hard drive bay, both of which are filled to capacity. What can you upgrade? The RAM and the hard drive, usually, though some systems don’t even allow this. A good pair of speakers can last a decade or more - but most all-in-ones only offer mediocre sound, at best. Today’s 1080p displays will seem similarly out of style in 2025. A typical monitor sold a decade ago had a 19-inch display with 1,280 x 768 resolution. While both tend to age better than a processor, they do eventually go obsolete. You also can’t upgrade the display or the speakers. The same is almost always true of discrete graphics, if it was offered at the time the system was purchased. A chip designed for BGA is soldered to the motherboard, so it cannot be replaced or upgraded by the user. Almost every PC in the category has a ball grid array (BGA) processor. Unfortunately the AIO, which will likely feel slow sooner than a tower, isn’t a great platform for upgrades. Today’s computers last a very long time, but after four or five years many start to show their age, and that’s especially true for systems that weren’t cutting-edge to begin with. Since an all-in-one is slower to start with, you’ll need to upgrade it more quickly. And, at the high-end, the AIO segment simply disappears. A thousand bucks will barely buy a quad-core all-in-one with a 1080p display, but the same price will easily net you a desktop with a Core i7 Quad, gobs of RAM and discrete graphics. The gap only gets worse as prices increase. It’s not an exaggeration to say the traditional PC is twice as quick. Even at that low price, you can easily snag a Core i5 quad-core with a base clock of 3.2GHz. Let’s assume the display brings about $150 of value to the system, giving you $580 to spend on a comparable tower. That’s a dual-core chip with a base clock of 1.7GHz and a maximum Turbo Boost of 2.7GHz. According to Newegg, its most popular incarnation is $730 and packs a Core i5-4210U. The best-selling Lenovo C50 is a great example. The all-in-one isn’t a great platform for upgrades.
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