dmroeder
Lifetime Supporting Member
At Delta we buy Dell computers because we have an account and get discounts. However, for some applications I like the Intel NUCs. We have many. I replaced my old Mac Pro with an Intel Nuc at work. It cost half as much and is 3 times as powerful but it is also 10 years newer.
Ditto the comments about SSD. The NVME SSD are great. I buy 1TB SSD from Amazon. I use them in my NAS ( Synology DS1019+ ) newer.
The CPU is not as important as the SSD.
I often do video work now. I7s are fast enough although I have an I9 at home.
Graphic cards are another big expense. I don't see where PLC programming or any programming needs more than the built in graphics capability.
I got a GTX1080 to play games. Not the shoot em up type. I wanted the CUDA cores for playing chess. PLCs software does not need this. In this case the NUCs with built in graphic cards work well enough. Just get 2400 MHz memory and at fast NVME SSD for the main system disk.
I'm going into the weeds here, so apologies, but I have a Synology NAS, the thing is pretty dang good.