It's industry standard to replace desktops after 5 years and laptops after 3 years.
The longer you run a machine the more chance you have for hardware failure and down time.
I stick with Dell business and usually will run a desktop for 5 years before formatting it and passing it along to reception.
This plan had worked great until this past tax season when my old tower had a hard drive failure.
It was caught early enough to salvage the data with only a few bad sectors, but it's a little life lesson.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
My opinion on the SFF, typically speaking the smaller things get the more they cost.
A prime example of this is a laptop with very similar specs to a desktop. The laptop used to cost 2x the price.
I am not sure if this is still true with the SFF towers, but I have always preferred a tower that I could add and expand, and easily get to things inside. If space is at that much of a premium for you, then perhaps the small form factor is worth considering.
I am currently running an Optiplex 7070, and prior to that I had an optiplex 9020 because that was the only dell tower that would support 3 monitors about 7 years ago, and before that was an optiplex 360..
Without pulling the benchmark data on those 2 processors, I would say both of those machines should be very capable to run anything an accountant would need. Besides the jump from i5 to i7, and the difference between the 512 and 1TB of SSD hard drive space, I'm not really seeing the huge price jump.
The first one does include a $300 monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse (I prefer wired personally)
Benchmarks
the i7 is ranked 424
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=3793the i5 is ranked 377
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=3737My current machine has a i7-9700 which ranks 344, 16MB ram and 250GB SSD - which is okay because I have a server enviroment.
The SFF seems to be cheaper and faster, but a smaller HD.
It appears you are not comparing apples to apples with the 2 sets of specs you provided.