How did we get here?
My effort to find older budget PC’s and upgrade them has almost become a quest. I find an old prebuilt, or a motherboard/CPU combo then match the rest of the components, to get the best result per dollar. Often, this is a process that is tedious and frustrating. Occasionally, this turns out better than it has any right to.
One such example of success was the three hundred dollar Xeon build, here. There are too many failures to actually list, most recently, many of the yard sale PCs that are here. Of course there are others that fall somewhere between, but sometimes the effort matches the result. You start with a solid foundation, and there is room for improvement, at a reasonable price, Price in this case, being not just the cost, but the work.
One such example is the HP Z440 Workstation. These can be found all over for a range of prices, but the trick is to find one at a low cost, that comes with components like memory or maybe even a hard drive. These machines are capable of using an NVMe drive on an adapter card, and come with a quite capable processor. The one I purchased was on eBay with modest tax and shipping, for one hundred two dollars.
The Workstation
This came included with an E5 1650 v3, six core, twelve thread processor, 16GB of DDR4 error correcting memory, a seven hundred watt power supply, and a Quadro K4200 video card. It was clean and exactly as described in the listing. This was almost ready out of the box. And, let’s spend a moment on the box.
Sometimes, despite the best effort of the seller, they are at the mercy of the delivery company. In my case, FedEx physically moved a previously delivered package, and put both directly in the rain. I know they moved the other package, because it was Amazon, who sent a picture of that package on the other side of the doorstep, dry. Still, the PC was packaged well, and was dry on the inside.
Tests with the SSD in the Amazon package revealed a post and very strong testing in pr5oductivity applications. Less impressive were gaming tests, but The Quadro, with 4GB of VRAM, is not a gaming card. I do have gaming cards, though. Among them is a GTX 1660, the workhorse. Low power draw and good performance promise to make this Z440 a solid gaming option for under two hundred dollars. The previously tested Xeon E3 1270, with all new components, ran about three hundred.
Put an NVMe drive and a better GPU like an RTX 3060ti, or RX 6600XT, and the gains improve even more. Increase the memory, and we get a serious gaming PC that still doesn’t cost everything on the farm. Each of these will get their own video and blog, but suffice to say, this PC may return every ounce of effort I put in it.
The video for this blog is found here.
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