While we attempt to keep a stockpile of working -- though usually at least 5 years old -- desktop computers available for faculty to request for their research labs and research assistants, sometimes, you just need to purchase a new computer or piece of software.

ECE IT Purchasing Process

MarketPlace

Campus Bookstore

Receiving and Setup

New Faculty

Combined Purchasing Initiative

Software Licensing

ClickWrap Agreements

IT Purchase Compliance

OK... IT orders... yes, we handle all of that. When you need anything, just email ecehelp@ncsu.edu to request it. We'll work with you to spec out whatever you need, then we'll request an account number to charge to as well as a brief justification statement for the financial people (all needed for the paperwork we do). This covers all computers, laptops, tablets, software, etc. We place all of these orders centrally, receive them, and in most cases, inventory them (we don't inventory accessories or monitors), before bringing them to you and getting them setup for you.

All NC State computers must be centrally managed and secured. We have management environments in Windows, Linux (RHEL and Ubuntu), and MacOS for this purpose.

We have contracts in place that limit who we can purchase from. It won't always be the cheapest option. But NC State has decided that there's more to the costs of computer support than that.

When I first arrived here at NC State (20yrs ago), we had computers from all manner of vendors and many custom/home built systems. Faculty would simply purchase the cheapest option they could find online. But the sticker price of the hardware doesn't account for the total cost of ownership -- it doesn't take into account the cost for supporting the hardware, and especially not the cost of securing it. These costs were being placed on others instead of on the research grants as they should be.

About 10 years ago, the campus adopted the Consolidated IT Purchasing Initial to address these issues (and to meet new state laws). The CPI requires that we purchase all of our computers from a limited set of vendors which provide a standard of support we've come to trust and can take advantage of efficiently, helps to minimize the costs for creating security and support programs by reducing the number of vendors we have to deal with, and generally also gets us some financial savings as our contracts do provide us discounts on certain predefined models which meet most of our administrative and research needs.

The vendors in this program are Apple, Dell, and Lenovo. Technically, HP as well, but we (as a department) have generally not used them (outside of printers).

So when I talk about ECE as a Dell shop, what I'm really saying is that NC State has selected Dell as one of its limited vendors of choice and Dell is the majority of our systems.

Historically, the only exceptions we allow to the CPI had been for large specialized GPU servers which Dell didn't provide options for though over the past few years, this has been less and less of an issue -- we have 10x GPU servers from them now. And I don't love what we got stuck with prior to that. Beyond those -- literally, 1/2 dozen -- systems we've purchased a few of the Microsoft Surface laptops as we didn't have great tablet alternatives (we still allow Surface purchases as an exception). Outside of that, we're mostly Dell and Apple, and Lenovo laptops.

Campus as a whole has been working to shore up all of its IT infrastructure and security policies -- something that I've been shielding most of the ECE faculty from as ECE is generally ahead of the game as we established and implemented most of these new security policies years ago. But having standardized hardware is critical to this effort -- keep in mind that we support 2000 systems (our departmental IT infrastructure is larger than 1/2 of the colleges here at NCSU).

I provide all of this information merely to explain why we cannot (nor wish to) purchase everything you might see while looking around for deals. We have legal, security, support, and policy reasons for why we purchase from Dell.

In general, most incoming faculty will purchase themselves a desktop (usually a Dell Optiplex unless you plan to do GPU processing) for their office (along w/ a pair of nice higher end LCDs), a B/W printer (not required, but pretty standard -- believe our current model is the HP LaserJet 404dn) as we have large enterprise color printers when needed in central locations (for you, we'll need to figure out the cluster printing situation), and a laptop. Laptops tend to be where we have more variety -- Dell, Apple, Lenovo, Surface -- with each prof deciding if they prefer light or more powerful, 12" or 15", etc. We have a couple profs who prefer to drop the office desktop in favor of just a highend laptop and docking station -- we recommend the office desktop for reliability, but it's your call.

I will note that we do not permit dual boot -- one OS per computer and we will only permit MacOS on Apple hardware.

Students can be provided a new desktop from your startup funds, or we can provide a free computer. We are constantly collecting older computers which we can provide for free to researchers for their students or for use in their labs -- some of these might be hand-me-downs from our teaching labs, or come from other departments entirely. With our scale, we're constantly trying to source free computers as faculty tend to purchase so few computers. These are usually going to be at least 5yrs old. But they're free. Most new research desktops will run you about $1200-$1500 these days (add $157 per each 23" standard LCD purchased -- and most of our students want dual LCDs). If you want your students to have GPUs in their systems, then double that starting price and go up from there as you add additional RAM, etc.

And I'll note that shipping times have gotten ridiculous during COVID -- we're looking at 2-4 months for some configurations.