I was given a HP Z400 for free from work. It has a W3680 (6c, 12t) and 24 gb DDR3 ram in triple channel. I have a 6 pin to 8 pin convertor cable and added a GTX 1660 ti. Runs really well. A nice 1080p gaming machine.
Despite how old the xeon is, it still handles games quite well. This $250 rig that has a whopping 64gb of ram and water cooling just ticks all the boxes. I wonder if its possible to obtain a 1660/ti for the same price or less. Great value, very nice benchmarks!
I own one of these :) Some info: The PSU for this Z420, at least the 600W model, actually have "overspecced" 6-pin graphics power connectors. They can supply a lot more power that a normal, standard, 6-pin, so a proper adapter to either 1x 8-pin or maybe a 6-pin to 2x 6-pin should provide enough power for GPU's that demand a bit more power. If you want to replace it you MUST also buy a connector adapter for the motherboard power as those are not standard. A good CPU upgrade, if you have the water cooler that is + the right v2-capable motherboard (yeah, there are 2 versions...), is the 8 core Xeon 2687W v2 that boosts to 4Ghz. Basically any 130W+ cpu is going to need the water cooler, or the workstation will complain at boot up. Back and front fan can be replaced with standard fans like Noctua ones, but the CPU fan connector is a proprietary 5-pin thingy. Sometimes a front fan is required in order to use a high-powered GPU.
I've successfully used adaptors to drive a two 8 pin PCIe GPU. You can also use Molex to PCIe adaptors but don't use SATA to PCIe because the SATA part catches fire.
I've got seven similar machines like these at work. Dual Xeons, 128GB RAM so it's decent. I got a molex to 6 pin power adapter cable from Startech and I am running two 1080 tis in each. Not recommended but they've been going for years without issue.
I had a 1650 GDDR6 for a while (1.5 years) and i overclocked it, and i never had any problems running AAA titles at my 768p screen res. i could lock my games to 60fps and set them to high most of the time, all for only 80W power draw after OC. The 1650 D6 is better than you think for budget gaming.
I owned a z600 a couple of years ago. Duel cpu and 32gb ram. 12 cores and 24 threads. Was an absolute beast! Stuck a r9 380x in there (all i could afford at the time) and was perfect for 1080p gaming
For the price? Amazing deal. You can even use that ram as a disk cache with a software like Ramdisk and have smaller games run on your system memory for a very fast loading time experience especially if you don't have a large SSD on the system for example.
Just upgraded my i7 4820k to a xeon e5 1650v2, have it running 32gb ram with my 1070ti and its such a beast of a system especially with the xeon overclocked
I'm always retiring old workstations like this one. They often get sold to resellers, and I always hope they end up making someone get into cheap PC gaming.
Some interesting hardware for £103, that Velociraptor 10K HDD is quite a rarity these days, wondered what that would be like to use with Win 10. So many options for kids starting out these days, it's great. So much better than the simple route of getting a console.
@@blunderingfool most servers did that until not too long ago due to it being convenient for boot/hot swap until ssds got cheap enough that the power savings made more sense, for high performance you still have u.2/m.2 and many others as well , you can probably still find brand new sas 10 and 15k drives, though the velociraptors were a unique breed being 10k and sata not sas. Also I bet those are pretty snappy still and can be used a a secondary drive for less demanding games. I actually have a 300GB and a 600GB velociraptor in my collection.
new enterprise drives with higher caches(128mb -512mb) would likely perform better and still not SAS on most models. be aware many do come with the option for SAS. the drive i have always wanted to try was the hybrid drive . short lived but ssd and hard drive in the same enclosure.
They are going the simple route of getting a console anyway as kids nowadays don't want the hassle of researching for best deals and upgrade paths, they just want plug and play.
@@mmaayyssoonn8858 Yeah, it was a shame that Intel locked down the 2600 series at the last minute. If you can find one at a good price, do try to get a 1680-V2. Best CPU for X79. Mine sits at 4.8GHz all core, at 1.335v, and I am running 32GB (8x4GB) of Dominator GT 2133 CL9 at 2400MHz. My 1660-V2 is not as good of a chip, but it still does 4.6GHz all core.
@@mmaayyssoonn8858 Yeah, there is a way to get the 2600 series to run at an all core turbo. And you can always add a few MHz to the BCLK. Careful with that though. I would not go past 103MHz, as it can mess with PCI-e devices. Your board should have an external clock gen, so you might be able to get it to 107MHz on the BCLK. May have to up the voltage a bit too, and V-Droop to level 4.
i saw this video pop up soon as i was considering of buying one, i thought to myself. i wounder if one of my fav youtubers did a video on it? (1 hour later) THE VIDEO APPEARS!!!! i knew i could count on you, keep it up
Always welcome to see apex in the mix on benchmarks as I'm always playing that one, would be interesting to see some MMO's in the tests as I know a fair few people with low end/cheaper systems who play alot of wow/FF etc.
Just been having a look for one of these as the next step up from my Optiplex build. You got that for an incredible price!! All those I can see are too expensive to be worthwhile over a retail board and K series CPU which I could overclock. I'll keep an eye out though until one comes up.
I’ve got one of these i built piece by piece into an old 90s gaming case, it’s got 32gb of ram, a Xeon E5 1620V2 (4 cores 8 threads, 3.7ghz) an RX580 4GB and the stock 600 watt power supply, it is a low budget BEAST that can run anything from the past decade at high/ultra settings and playable frame rates. Still to this day I haven’t been able to build something that even comes close to the price/performance of this machine
Ah memories. I've had Z workstation at my school. It had 2 CPUs tho and one of it's features was rapid switch between Linux and Windows. And also these are chunkers, way too heavy to move around the room
For a budget PC it can't be easier with one of these older workstations. I managed to get a HP Z620 with e5 2690 and 64GB of memory and it also came with a 480GB SSD for £100 off Ebay! It came with no GPU but a surprise was that it was a dual CPU system! I got a RX6600 for £230 and used the 1TB HDD from my old system. The only caveat is to find one with a processor with at least 6 cores and a high enough clock speed which basically narrows it down to the Xeon e5 1650 and above.
The CPU has more in it than is possible on some HP prebuilt. The E5-16xx Xeons had an unlocked multiplier up to and including the last engineering samples of the 16xx V4 and quite massive overclocks are possible with these, getting them close to 5820k levels of performance. If put on a good X79 motherboard, and with proper tuning, it can power a 2080 or similar card without leaving any noticeable amount of performance on the table.
I'm running my £20 delivered HP Compaq Elite USDT with a miniPCI breakout cable and its running quite nicely with my old 750ti, video playback is very good very impressed and I do intend to ramp up the ram and fit a SSD.
The z420... I've used it's motherboard, in an old case I bought 2003 for the Athlon XP I had then, to assemble my NAS with 20x 3tb sas drives (8 are over the case in 3d printed suports/brackets). Used an E5 2697 V2 with 128gb of DDR3 ECC 1600mhz. There is huge value in the z420 bought used.
Bought a Z620 for £100 (Sheffield, seller has another if you want me to hook you up), switched the CPU (which was 8 core Sandybridge E, but only boosted to 3Ghz) to the highest CPU model it could take, which was same gen 8 core / 16 thread, but boosts to 3.5Ghz all core (£28 on Ebay). I also added a GTX 1080 (£140 used FB marketplace), which is about as high as I can go with dual 6 pin without adapter cables. It has superb airflow with 2 no. 80mm extractor fans, 64Gb DDR3 1600 (4x16Gb sticks, I still have 4 unused slots, in quad channel), and I added a 512Gb SSD for about £30. Total cost was about £295 all in. Beast machine for the price. Other nice features are the lifting handles front and back, quick release full aluminium side panel, hot swappable 3.5" / 2.5" drive bays, and integrated 800W Gold PSU.
recently did a psu swap on my z420, things to keep in mind is the 24-18 pin adapters are quite unreliable i.e. you won't know if it's going to work at all until you plug it all in, and the stock psu is non atx standard so you will need to make/buy an adapter to go from the case to the smaller atx powersupply
love the video. i have an idea. you should do a collab with other pc youtubers and make scrapyard videos (like in LTT) or challenges like this would be fun to watch .
Got a similar HP workstation a while back for video editing. Read that using graphics card power adapters can cause the system to turn off suddenly if power draw from the graphics card spikes higher than the PSU can deal with. And I didn't want to replace the PSU. So I got a 1060 6GB founders edition graphics card which has a 6 pin connector. Works fine, runs less demanding PCVR games OK too.
HP Z420 and especially Z440 workstations make for inexpensive servers too! The extra PCIe connectivity comes in handy if you want to install a decent GPU for Plex transcoding or GPU based video rendering. You still have PCIe 8x and/or 16x slots left for a cheap SAS HBA for loads of storage. Plus you can outfit them with a ton of RAM cheaply for running VMs or Docker containers and the like. They can be the decent basis for a quiet and relatively inexpensive home lab setup.
Got one of these HP Workstations last year to replace my dad's aging PC. It's a silver Z400 with a 4 core 8 thread Xeon, 16gb ECC DDR3 Memory and an AMD Barco MXRT-5400 GPU. I got it off ebay for £63 including delivery. Just had to chuck in an SSD and it was ready to go. The size and weight of these machines can't be overstated. The side panel alone weights almost as much as some cheap PC cases.
Probably not an option on this motherboard, but these Xeons overclock extremely well. They're not far off a Ryzen 3600 for gaming performance once you push them to 4.5GHz or more. Obviously power consumption is much higher though.
mines oced to 4.6 ghz with 2400mhz ram in quad channel it falls between a 3600x and 5600x in alot of games that use all cores in single thread im between 2600x and the 3600x
Cyberpunk is almost fully utilizing the CPU. It's fun to think about how at time people were arguing that even 4c4t i5s were a little much. I don't think many would believe you if you said eight or so years later that a current workstation CPU working at full capacity would struggle with gaming.
Great video as always. This has always been a fantastic budget option of getting a solid office PC which is made to last, and adding a decent card to it. It would be nice if you had a side by side comparison of the same benchmarks from your 12100F or 13100F, to show just how much performance is left on the table by the 1650 if going this route.
I have a z420, I use it for controlling telescopes and rendering images. It lives in my outhouse lol. Relatively powerful, runs quiet and cool. Built like a tank. Will game too, it has an E-5 1660 (6 core) @ 3.9ghz, 32gb ram and has a rtx 2060 shoved in there. Not a patch on my gaming rig but it would get the job done if my main rig failed 👍
One of these days I'd like to kit out an office case as a high end sleeper gaming PC. However, the performance with just a dedicated GPU alone is always a pleasant surprise.
@@nicekeyboardalan6972 If you buy that card, you can get latest official nvidia drivers from guy that modifies them to work with chinese cards. (FrankenDriver by arutar)
Great video mate , I've been retired for just over a year now and my i79700k and Asus Rog Strix 3070tioc is going to have to last me . Hopefully I'll get at least 5 more years out of it 🙂
@@PhilipKerry You'd be amazed how far my old HD 5850 has kept trucking into modern game territory. I use an RX 6600, but occasionally pop the old fella in to see how it does. Lack of DX12 support and one gig of VRAM are the only limiting factors. You'll be very happy even when your card is 10 years old, as you'll still be current on DirectX until just shy of that.
Bagged one of these for €50 at the start of the pandemic. Sold the quadro like yourself and bought an RX580 8G, SSD, 1866Mhz Ram and E5-2667v2 CPU. It's good price performance on one of these machines. There's 3 versions of the PSU, 400w, 600w one 6 pin, 600w two 6 pin GPU cables. Thankfully mine came with the two 6 pin. Your z420 has the AIO liquid cooler so it can take the E5-2687W v2, without that cooler the best options are E5-1680 v2 or 2667v2
I got an e5 1680 v2 a couple of years ago, didnt notice any difference in games vs my 3770k but it edits photos a lot quicker! Started with a rampage iv extreme, which has insufficient heatsinks for the vrms, so picked up a faulty rampage iv black edition (00 error) which had clearly had been used for liquid nitrogen at some point as the cpu socket is full of vaseline... which I couldnt get working at the time, but I really should have another go with it sometime
My HP Z440 is still holding up today I see people build pcs with pcs that they invest to much in looks/cpu then don’t have enough money for a decent gpu. With builds like these you can invest more in the gpu which for most games means more fps.
It feels like you overpaid by a few bucks. You can find the slightly better HP Z440 system for the same price... or even less. Haswell + DDR4 makes a vast improvement.
I don't know if you'll see this but when benchmarking Apex go solo fill in Battle Royale and see the frame rate in the Dropship because that frame rate shows the lowest you may get in a full match
Warzone absolutely stresses the CPU's weaknesses a good deal more than MW itself does so could definitely be worth testing, my i7-6800k isn't too different from this and I get some big fps drops in that game at times
@@RandomGaminginHD that'd be really nice to see, between that and Elden Ring the limits of CPUs like these can begin to show at times Warzone tends to drop the most when you're in the dense city areas and loading in chunks of the map
I actually build similar systems just to sell for a small profit. I tend to go for Haswell (Xeon v3) or higher though since they use DDR4 RAM and have better IPC.
Love these HP systems, Just got a HP Z230 this month for £125, finaaly decided to upgrade from 1st gen i7 to 4th gen, came with 1tb SSD & 1tb HDD and 24gb RAM, from old PC added second 1tb HDD, swapped the mismatched x2 4gb sticks for x4 8gb sticks now 32GB AND my GTX960, runs well, deffo improvements :) Edit:Windows 11 runs well with GWSL and also Windows Subsystem for Android
I bought mine from a seller in Canary Wharf for £60. It had 8GB of RAM and two Quadro K600's inside of it. My ex-housemate left some PC parts when he moved out and I've upped the RAM to 32GB octa-channel and a Xeon E5-1650 from its 1620 v2. The GPU is now a 4GB RADEON R9 290X VAPOR-X that was given to me by an old college friend I reconnected with. For £60, I think it's great! I did intend to give this to my dad, but I'm falling in love with it!
Some of these older professional workstations make excellent gaming computers. I'm tinkering right now with two Dell Precision workstations I found that were put out on the curb for the trash. Both have powerful Xeons and 32gb of quad channel RAM, one being DDR3 and the other being DDR4. If you have a Win7 Pro DVD you can install Win7 and the BIOS of many OEM systems has the key and then you can upgrade to Win10 Pro for free.
solid little machine. my lil brother was wanting to play gta and fortnite on pc managed a nice little build for about £170 used parts local windforce gtx 980 4690k with the board and 16gb hyper x beast ram and a hyper 212 evo put it all in my spare pc case and got a 650w psu from cooler master runs solid on everything hes playing currently wish i could have got the i7 at least for the threads but this older i5 still does some numbers
There is very little to gain with even an i7 upgrade on Haswell Refresh. IPC is just too low for modern gaming. I have an i5-4460 and an R9 290, was able to try out a i7-4790 with everything else the same. I couldn't tell the difference, where my CPU fell short before (Division 2 for example), the i7 was still not giving me a better experience. I'd not spend any more money on that platform, enjoy while it lasts and save up in the meantime for something like a 12100F (+RAM&mobo) or future equivalent, gains will be crazy :)
@@verserain yh i used to have the 4770 i agree the perf gain itselif is not much but the lows are miles better and the threads keep more control of the stutter. will be giving him my 5600x board and ram when i upgrade to am5 so its all good, just somthing temp so he can play.
i'm not surprised this is good value, these(hp z490) are EVERYWHERE i have seen them at lot in my classrooms and lot of schools and organisations seem to like them!
I have this same PC, xeon e5 1620v2, 4x8GB ddr3, new PSU, RX580, 1 250 SSD for OS, 1 250GB nvme for gaming files (via pci card slot adapter) and 2 1TB 3.5 HDDs for data storage, a standard PSU needs some diy mods to hold it in place but it is worth it.
i managed to get a bargin proper gaming pc from cash converters. it is an asus gl12 with a i5-8400 and a 1060 3gb for a total of £260. i couldnt believe the price i paid for a pc that was a whole grand a few years ago. goodluck with the pc!
The xeons can be had real cheap for these and give a good boost to performance. That's really all it needs to keep that budget feel. You really don't want to be adding new psu, and video card, adapters at that point you should've just started a new build from scratch. Id love to see it upgraded though. I upgraded a t3500 I got for like $80. Had 2x8 ddr3, so I added another 8gb and ran in triple channel. Upgraded the i7 to a xeon 6c/12t for $20 which performed very close to a ryzen 5 2600. There was a higher core higher clock xeon but was too expensive for me. The t3500 i had came with a tower cooler that I added 2 fans to(zip ties) Added a ssd and a 1650 super with a 6 pin(psu came with it) it runs great.
I got the z600. Similar issues when it comes to limitation of power supply. The difference is I have a background that is in electrical and electronic engineering along with nuclear and CS. So I just modified the power supply to do what I needed. To be clear that isn't something anyone should do unless they know what they are doing! Seriously. But it is an option for those with the skills.
Just built a system with an AliExpress X79 board, the E5-1650v2 clocked @ 4.1Ghz, 16gb DDR3 1866Mhz, and Asus Strix R9 390 8gb for about $250 USD. Performs decent for aging hardware. Only downside is high temps and power draw from the R9 390.
Until recently, I'd been surviving this way for the last 15 years. Last time I upgraded a 16GB Z210 for 2077. I used the stock PSU and worked out the power budget by comparing against GPU upgrades sold directly from HP - Wikipedia nicely documents GPU core power consumption for comparison. The only thing that stopped me from upgrading to the latest generation of GPUs was the 6 pin power connector.
If you use windows 10 21h1 or earlier, you can overclock the E5-1650, 1660 and 1680 v0/v2 CPUs, they also support ECC Reg dimms, I have 128GB 1866Mhz in mine and I could clock it to 4.1Ghz all core. Also ran just fine with a titan X Pascal with a dodgy 6 pin splitter.
Z420 w/ 64GB is incredible find for that price. Still using equal Z-series with less memory for work and this is incredible machine, build like a tank. Just add SSD and decent GPU like gtx1060/6gb or 1660ti/super and it's still ok as long as you don't play newest games. With my old GOG-games and mainly strategy-titles this machine just flies.
compared to a normal desktop at a similar price point these things are a way better value. quad channel ram + more cores and you're able to use a wider variety of cards thanks to the psu. got something a little newer that's haswell based and i intend to use it for video editing in the near future.
I have a HP Elitedesk 800 G2 (tower version) with an i7 and just got the power supply adapter to turn it into my living room VR machine. It was free and has an i7-6700 in it with 32GB of DDR4 and a 1TB spinner in it. I got a WD Blue 1 TB SATA SSD for $60, a GTX 1660 Super for $108 on eBay, $7 for the power supply adapter, and $55 for a 550W PSU. For $230 I still shake my head at the $3k+ I have in my main PC when businesses are throwing out perfectly good systems simply because they aren't Windows 11 compatible (just a quick Rufus USB drive away from running 11 anyway).
Exactly the same Z420 got my GF from me years ago. It was supposed to be scrapped because in the policy of the company I got it from (ant worked as external it technician) said, that every PC who is older than 4 years has to be replaced. Only the harddisk needs to be destroyed. So I take it with me and made a gaming pc. Sadly, the PSU ist proprietary and taller than the usual ones. So you has to stick with it unless you might get a better one from HP.
lot of sellers on ebay have clocked that these old units are getting reused for gaming and accordingly have bumped up the prices which is a shame as it puts more people off geting one and geting more use out it
Not many people like them, but I really like the basic case look of these office pcs.
Yeah me too. No RGB for me 😁
Rgb is just a way to charge me more. So dumb
It's like Audi sports sedan, very conservative in looks but will surprise you in performance.
easily. i hate all the RGB's stuff on modern parts and i avoid them all the time. its useless only candy for some people.
For me specifications really matter than high end case.
always love these office pc builds
Me too, so many going cheap on eBay these days!
@@RandomGaminginHD hi my fluffy friend I love u buddy
I was given a HP Z400 for free from work. It has a W3680 (6c, 12t) and 24 gb DDR3 ram in triple channel. I have a 6 pin to 8 pin convertor cable and added a GTX 1660 ti. Runs really well. A nice 1080p gaming machine.
What a little beast!
Sounds great.
i had one, i moved to dell for x58 and im hunting for a 3680 to overclock
Despite how old the xeon is, it still handles games quite well. This $250 rig that has a whopping 64gb of ram and water cooling just ticks all the boxes. I wonder if its possible to obtain a 1660/ti for the same price or less. Great value, very nice benchmarks!
I recently found a 1660ti for less as it was listed as broken. Decided to start working randomly just today!
basically a 4960x i run the same one oced to 4.6 its pretty comparable to a 3600x/5600x when running quad channel ddr3 2400
@@RandomGaminginHD Yes! It would be cool if you could do a follow up video on this with 1660ti :)
i think an rx 580 8g could be cheaper, but a tad faster in newer games, same goes for the rx 590
@@josephdias5859 I hope no. i'm upgrading from a 1680 v2 to a 5600 tomorrow. I want to see big gains.
I love this budget PCs kind of videos. the mystery of what's inside always makes for a very interesting video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I love your pc builds. They're all pretty realistic for most of the time and also tells a lot about how you can get something for very very cheap.
Thank you
Love these videos. Just picked up a cheap Z440, added a 1070, PCIe NVMe card with 500GB drive, and a bunch of ram. Super cheap and runs great!!
I own one of these :)
Some info:
The PSU for this Z420, at least the 600W model, actually have "overspecced" 6-pin graphics power connectors. They can supply a lot more power that a normal, standard, 6-pin, so a proper adapter to either 1x 8-pin or maybe a 6-pin to 2x 6-pin should provide enough power for GPU's that demand a bit more power.
If you want to replace it you MUST also buy a connector adapter for the motherboard power as those are not standard.
A good CPU upgrade, if you have the water cooler that is + the right v2-capable motherboard (yeah, there are 2 versions...), is the 8 core Xeon 2687W v2 that boosts to 4Ghz. Basically any 130W+ cpu is going to need the water cooler, or the workstation will complain at boot up.
Back and front fan can be replaced with standard fans like Noctua ones, but the CPU fan connector is a proprietary 5-pin thingy. Sometimes a front fan is required in order to use a high-powered GPU.
I've successfully used adaptors to drive a two 8 pin PCIe GPU. You can also use Molex to PCIe adaptors but don't use SATA to PCIe because the SATA part catches fire.
I've got seven similar machines like these at work. Dual Xeons, 128GB RAM so it's decent. I got a molex to 6 pin power adapter cable from Startech and I am running two 1080 tis in each. Not recommended but they've been going for years without issue.
I had a 1650 GDDR6 for a while (1.5 years) and i overclocked it, and i never had any problems running AAA titles at my 768p screen res. i could lock my games to 60fps and set them to high most of the time, all for only 80W power draw after OC. The 1650 D6 is better than you think for budget gaming.
I owned a z600 a couple of years ago. Duel cpu and 32gb ram. 12 cores and 24 threads. Was an absolute beast! Stuck a r9 380x in there (all i could afford at the time) and was perfect for 1080p gaming
This is exactly what I did for my first PC. I took a Dell Precision T3500 with a Xeon X5680, added RAM, and an RX 590. Works decently in new games.
For the price? Amazing deal. You can even use that ram as a disk cache with a software like Ramdisk and have smaller games run on your system memory for a very fast loading time experience especially if you don't have a large SSD on the system for example.
Just upgraded my i7 4820k to a xeon e5 1650v2, have it running 32gb ram with my 1070ti and its such a beast of a system especially with the xeon overclocked
Adding on to this, make sure to disable spectre and meltdown fixes as it can yield a little higher fps
I love those old cases that were built like a tank.If you can get the old parts on the cheap still a lot of fun to be had.
Had these in college back in 2016-2017, great machines
I'm always retiring old workstations like this one. They often get sold to resellers, and I always hope they end up making someone get into cheap PC gaming.
I just started looking for a cheap workstation to build my girlfriend a budget gaming pc…. Right on time for this video my friend!
This will be more than suitable!
Some interesting hardware for £103, that Velociraptor 10K HDD is quite a rarity these days, wondered what that would be like to use with Win 10. So many options for kids starting out these days, it's great. So much better than the simple route of getting a console.
I've always wanted to put a few 10K RPM HDDs in RAID to see how fast you can go. :P
@@blunderingfool most servers did that until not too long ago due to it being convenient for boot/hot swap until ssds got cheap enough that the power savings made more sense, for high performance you still have u.2/m.2 and many others as well , you can probably still find brand new sas 10 and 15k drives, though the velociraptors were a unique breed being 10k and sata not sas. Also I bet those are pretty snappy still and can be used a a secondary drive for less demanding games. I actually have a 300GB and a 600GB velociraptor in my collection.
new enterprise drives with higher caches(128mb -512mb) would likely perform better and still not SAS on most models. be aware many do come with the option for SAS. the drive i have always wanted to try was the hybrid drive . short lived but ssd and hard drive in the same enclosure.
They are going the simple route of getting a console anyway as kids nowadays don't want the hassle of researching for best deals and upgrade paths, they just want plug and play.
I love the old Xeons! I have 2 X79 systems running them. An MSI with a 1660-V2, and an EVGA X79 Dark with a 1680-V2.
I've got an Asus RE4 Black with a 2670 v2. Without the potential to overclock it super hard it has definitely shown its age
@@mmaayyssoonn8858 Yeah, it was a shame that Intel locked down the 2600 series at the last minute. If you can find one at a good price, do try to get a 1680-V2. Best CPU for X79. Mine sits at 4.8GHz all core, at 1.335v, and I am running 32GB (8x4GB) of Dominator GT 2133 CL9 at 2400MHz.
My 1660-V2 is not as good of a chip, but it still does 4.6GHz all core.
@@CMDR_CLASSIFIED I got it running at 4.3 turbo with 2200mhz roughly. The was the absolute limit of everything while hamper PCI and IO a lot
@@mmaayyssoonn8858 Yeah, there is a way to get the 2600 series to run at an all core turbo. And you can always add a few MHz to the BCLK. Careful with that though. I would not go past 103MHz, as it can mess with PCI-e devices. Your board should have an external clock gen, so you might be able to get it to 107MHz on the BCLK. May have to up the voltage a bit too, and V-Droop to level 4.
I actually just built a pc for my friend using a 1650 v2 and an RX 580, love these super budget bang for the buck kinds of builds
i saw this video pop up soon as i was considering of buying one, i thought to myself. i wounder if one of my fav youtubers did a video on it? (1 hour later)
THE VIDEO APPEARS!!!! i knew i could count on you, keep it up
Always welcome to see apex in the mix on benchmarks as I'm always playing that one, would be interesting to see some MMO's in the tests as I know a fair few people with low end/cheaper systems who play alot of wow/FF etc.
Just been having a look for one of these as the next step up from my Optiplex build. You got that for an incredible price!! All those I can see are too expensive to be worthwhile over a retail board and K series CPU which I could overclock. I'll keep an eye out though until one comes up.
I’ve got one of these i built piece by piece into an old 90s gaming case, it’s got 32gb of ram, a Xeon E5 1620V2 (4 cores 8 threads, 3.7ghz) an RX580 4GB and the stock 600 watt power supply, it is a low budget BEAST that can run anything from the past decade at high/ultra settings and playable frame rates. Still to this day I haven’t been able to build something that even comes close to the price/performance of this machine
Ah memories. I've had Z workstation at my school. It had 2 CPUs tho and one of it's features was rapid switch between Linux and Windows. And also these are chunkers, way too heavy to move around the room
For a budget PC it can't be easier with one of these older workstations. I managed to get a HP Z620 with e5 2690 and 64GB of memory and it also came with a 480GB SSD for £100 off Ebay! It came with no GPU but a surprise was that it was a dual CPU system!
I got a RX6600 for £230 and used the 1TB HDD from my old system.
The only caveat is to find one with a processor with at least 6 cores and a high enough clock speed which basically narrows it down to the Xeon e5 1650 and above.
The CPU has more in it than is possible on some HP prebuilt. The E5-16xx Xeons had an unlocked multiplier up to and including the last engineering samples of the 16xx V4 and quite massive overclocks are possible with these, getting them close to 5820k levels of performance. If put on a good X79 motherboard, and with proper tuning, it can power a 2080 or similar card without leaving any noticeable amount of performance on the table.
Indeed as an xeon e5 16xx really starts to shine when overclocked North of 4ghz as the Ivybridge architecture overclocked really well
I had velociraptor hdd when they first came out, very cool
let's go bro, x58 has been overlooked for forever!!!
I would love to see a test of AMD 5600x COMBO. This combo consist in a Ryzen 5 5600X and RX 5600 XT, i think would be an interesting video.
Maybe a R7 5700x and RX 5700xt in a x570 motherboard.
@@JonathanCespedestvx570 is pointless, b550 has got almost all the features at a lower price
@@Boss-674 I get it but it's just because names with the 57 and the 'x' involved in all the components 😅
It runs well at 1080p and that is about it :D 5600x could support much better GPUs.
420, nice.
I remember these prebuilds from back when I watched a lot of pc related videos.
I have one for about 4 years now and it's the best purchase of my life
I'm running my £20 delivered HP Compaq Elite USDT with a miniPCI breakout cable and its running quite nicely with my old 750ti, video playback is very good very impressed and I do intend to ramp up the ram and fit a SSD.
One word to describe this: Underrated ❤
The z420... I've used it's motherboard, in an old case I bought 2003 for the Athlon XP I had then, to assemble my NAS with 20x 3tb sas drives (8 are over the case in 3d printed suports/brackets).
Used an E5 2697 V2 with 128gb of DDR3 ECC 1600mhz.
There is huge value in the z420 bought used.
Yeah absolute beasts
Bought a Z620 for £100 (Sheffield, seller has another if you want me to hook you up), switched the CPU (which was 8 core Sandybridge E, but only boosted to 3Ghz) to the highest CPU model it could take, which was same gen 8 core / 16 thread, but boosts to 3.5Ghz all core (£28 on Ebay). I also added a GTX 1080 (£140 used FB marketplace), which is about as high as I can go with dual 6 pin without adapter cables. It has superb airflow with 2 no. 80mm extractor fans, 64Gb DDR3 1600 (4x16Gb sticks, I still have 4 unused slots, in quad channel), and I added a 512Gb SSD for about £30. Total cost was about £295 all in. Beast machine for the price. Other nice features are the lifting handles front and back, quick release full aluminium side panel, hot swappable 3.5" / 2.5" drive bays, and integrated 800W Gold PSU.
it has that old instruction set tho, wouldn't touch anything below haswell
Is this your lawn that is so lush and green at the end of January? Very nice to see, it is cold and snowy here. Thank you.
recently did a psu swap on my z420, things to keep in mind is the 24-18 pin adapters are quite unreliable i.e. you won't know if it's going to work at all until you plug it all in, and the stock psu is non atx standard so you will need to make/buy an adapter to go from the case to the smaller atx powersupply
love the video. i have an idea. you should do a collab with other pc youtubers and make scrapyard videos (like in LTT) or challenges like this would be fun to watch .
This machine would make an amazing Plex box, especially with the 1650 and hardware transcoding.
I love these kind of vids ❤
Thanks! I love making them
Got a similar HP workstation a while back for video editing. Read that using graphics card power adapters can cause the system to turn off suddenly if power draw from the graphics card spikes higher than the PSU can deal with. And I didn't want to replace the PSU. So I got a 1060 6GB founders edition graphics card which has a 6 pin connector. Works fine, runs less demanding PCVR games OK too.
HP Z420 and especially Z440 workstations make for inexpensive servers too! The extra PCIe connectivity comes in handy if you want to install a decent GPU for Plex transcoding or GPU based video rendering. You still have PCIe 8x and/or 16x slots left for a cheap SAS HBA for loads of storage. Plus you can outfit them with a ton of RAM cheaply for running VMs or Docker containers and the like. They can be the decent basis for a quiet and relatively inexpensive home lab setup.
Got one of these HP Workstations last year to replace my dad's aging PC. It's a silver Z400 with a 4 core 8 thread Xeon, 16gb ECC DDR3 Memory and an AMD Barco MXRT-5400 GPU. I got it off ebay for £63 including delivery. Just had to chuck in an SSD and it was ready to go. The size and weight of these machines can't be overstated. The side panel alone weights almost as much as some cheap PC cases.
I just got a Sapphire RX580 8gb for $70USD ($100AUD) I'm quite surprised how good it is and how well it runs games.
Wow that's so cheap. Costs 200 pounds in England
@@blitzedoblivion4280 try ordering it cheap on some online store and maybe it wont get import taxed
@@blitzedoblivion4280 Huh? Where the hell are you trying to buy stuff. Cheap on eBay and CEX.
I love these workstations specially the SSF workstations the build quality is solid and unlike optiplexes these have ample space for graphics cards.
solid video mate ☕ quality of content 👌
Probably not an option on this motherboard, but these Xeons overclock extremely well. They're not far off a Ryzen 3600 for gaming performance once you push them to 4.5GHz or more. Obviously power consumption is much higher though.
mines oced to 4.6 ghz with 2400mhz ram in quad channel it falls between a 3600x and 5600x in alot of games that use all cores in single thread im between 2600x and the 3600x
Cyberpunk is almost fully utilizing the CPU. It's fun to think about how at time people were arguing that even 4c4t i5s were a little much. I don't think many would believe you if you said eight or so years later that a current workstation CPU working at full capacity would struggle with gaming.
Great video as always. This has always been a fantastic budget option of getting a solid office PC which is made to last, and adding a decent card to it. It would be nice if you had a side by side comparison of the same benchmarks from your 12100F or 13100F, to show just how much performance is left on the table by the 1650 if going this route.
GREAT video !~ I love the Z420s I cant help but wonder if LowCastle Tech will chime in.. pretty sure hes a Z420 Guru LOL LOL
I have a z420, I use it for controlling telescopes and rendering images. It lives in my outhouse lol. Relatively powerful, runs quiet and cool. Built like a tank. Will game too, it has an E-5 1660 (6 core) @ 3.9ghz, 32gb ram and has a rtx 2060 shoved in there. Not a patch on my gaming rig but it would get the job done if my main rig failed 👍
One of these days I'd like to kit out an office case as a high end sleeper gaming PC. However, the performance with just a dedicated GPU alone is always a pleasant surprise.
Your dog sounds great, there's no need to apologize ❤
As for 1650s, I only saw those with GDDR5 without external power connector. Not sure though...
Absolutely love the licenseplate on the Focus in Forza, "3000gOMG" 🤣
Brilliant. I have a hp wx6400 16gb with a R9 280. I still use it. Works good for me.
Right now, GTX 1650 Supers are below $100 on eBay. That would have been a good choice for this.
Might be a little more money, but I think sourcing an RX6600m from AliExpress would be even better than this 1650. Double the vram always helps :)
Agree with you, would be nice to see someone test it
Yeah I love installing Chinese driver's with no signature
@@nicekeyboardalan6972 that's only required for Nvidia Mobile GPUs. AMD Mobile GPUs have no problem installing the official drivers
@@Nonebit I just saw a video where a guy had that problem but if you're correct that's cool
@@nicekeyboardalan6972 If you buy that card, you can get latest official nvidia drivers from guy that modifies them to work with chinese cards. (FrankenDriver by arutar)
Great video mate , I've been retired for just over a year now and my i79700k and Asus Rog Strix 3070tioc is going to have to last me . Hopefully I'll get at least 5 more years out of it 🙂
Yeah you definitely will, especially with the likes of FSR and DLSS
@@RandomGaminginHD I've got 32gb of DDR 4 3200mhz ram so at least I'm ok there .
@@PhilipKerry You'd be amazed how far my old HD 5850 has kept trucking into modern game territory.
I use an RX 6600, but occasionally pop the old fella in to see how it does.
Lack of DX12 support and one gig of VRAM are the only limiting factors.
You'll be very happy even when your card is 10 years old, as you'll still be current on DirectX until just shy of that.
It would certainly last into PS5 era, considering that hardware in consoles does not automatically upgrade itself, contrary to popular opinion 😁😆
@@aleksazunjic9672 If you're replying to me, then heck yeah.
Thts awesome, subbed, great info, can't believe tht thing can game in 2023
Many can
I had one for a while. I had a Vega 56 in it. Great for gaming.
Bagged one of these for €50 at the start of the pandemic. Sold the quadro like yourself and bought an RX580 8G, SSD, 1866Mhz Ram and E5-2667v2 CPU. It's good price performance on one of these machines. There's 3 versions of the PSU, 400w, 600w one 6 pin, 600w two 6 pin GPU cables. Thankfully mine came with the two 6 pin. Your z420 has the AIO liquid cooler so it can take the E5-2687W v2, without that cooler the best options are E5-1680 v2 or 2667v2
With RDR2 i was shocked i can run that good on those settings
My first modern gaming capable system was a HP Z400 in 2013/2014 with a Xeon W3520 (i7-920), 12GB RAM and a GTX 660 DC2 OC
Great video m8, I love those Workstation builds. Would be interesting to see what an E5-2687W and more powerful GPU (+ PSU) would bring to the table.
I got an e5 1680 v2 a couple of years ago, didnt notice any difference in games vs my 3770k but it edits photos a lot quicker! Started with a rampage iv extreme, which has insufficient heatsinks for the vrms, so picked up a faulty rampage iv black edition (00 error) which had clearly had been used for liquid nitrogen at some point as the cpu socket is full of vaseline... which I couldnt get working at the time, but I really should have another go with it sometime
He is getting better in games!!!
My HP Z440 is still holding up today I see people build pcs with pcs that they invest to much in looks/cpu then don’t have enough money for a decent gpu.
With builds like these you can invest more in the gpu which for most games means more fps.
I love the look of those office towers. Way better than the RGB puke that is common in 'gaming' towers.
It feels like you overpaid by a few bucks.
You can find the slightly better HP Z440 system for the same price... or even less.
Haswell + DDR4 makes a vast improvement.
I had one of these.. Good solid machine. Slapped a 2667v2 in mine and bought 128gb ram i got cheap from an ebay bid. Then slapped a 1070 inside 😀
Awesome upgrades
I don't know if you'll see this but when benchmarking Apex go solo fill in Battle Royale and see the frame rate in the Dropship because that frame rate shows the lowest you may get in a full match
Warzone absolutely stresses the CPU's weaknesses a good deal more than MW itself does so could definitely be worth testing, my i7-6800k isn't too different from this and I get some big fps drops in that game at times
Ah ok perhaps I will add it to the benchmarks as well
@@RandomGaminginHD that'd be really nice to see, between that and Elden Ring the limits of CPUs like these can begin to show at times
Warzone tends to drop the most when you're in the dense city areas and loading in chunks of the map
I actually build similar systems just to sell for a small profit. I tend to go for Haswell (Xeon v3) or higher though since they use DDR4 RAM and have better IPC.
I like the fact that xeon still holds up to the task
Still capable cpu
Love these HP systems, Just got a HP Z230 this month for £125, finaaly decided to upgrade from 1st gen i7 to 4th gen, came with 1tb SSD & 1tb HDD and 24gb RAM, from old PC added second 1tb HDD, swapped the mismatched x2 4gb sticks for x4 8gb sticks now 32GB AND my GTX960, runs well, deffo improvements :)
Edit:Windows 11 runs well with GWSL and also Windows Subsystem for Android
I bought mine from a seller in Canary Wharf for £60. It had 8GB of RAM and two Quadro K600's inside of it. My ex-housemate left some PC parts when he moved out and I've upped the RAM to 32GB octa-channel and a Xeon E5-1650 from its 1620 v2. The GPU is now a 4GB RADEON R9 290X VAPOR-X that was given to me by an old college friend I reconnected with.
For £60, I think it's great! I did intend to give this to my dad, but I'm falling in love with it!
Yeah great deal!
Some of these older professional workstations make excellent gaming computers. I'm tinkering right now with two Dell Precision workstations I found that were put out on the curb for the trash. Both have powerful Xeons and 32gb of quad channel RAM, one being DDR3 and the other being DDR4. If you have a Win7 Pro DVD you can install Win7 and the BIOS of many OEM systems has the key and then you can upgrade to Win10 Pro for free.
solid little machine. my lil brother was wanting to play gta and fortnite on pc managed a nice little build for about £170 used parts local
windforce gtx 980
4690k with the board and 16gb hyper x beast ram and a hyper 212 evo
put it all in my spare pc case and got a 650w psu from cooler master
runs solid on everything hes playing currently wish i could have got the i7 at least for the threads but this older i5 still does some numbers
Great build, you can always upgrade to the i7 later if necessary:)
There is very little to gain with even an i7 upgrade on Haswell Refresh. IPC is just too low for modern gaming. I have an i5-4460 and an R9 290, was able to try out a i7-4790 with everything else the same. I couldn't tell the difference, where my CPU fell short before (Division 2 for example), the i7 was still not giving me a better experience. I'd not spend any more money on that platform, enjoy while it lasts and save up in the meantime for something like a 12100F (+RAM&mobo) or future equivalent, gains will be crazy :)
@@verserain yh i used to have the 4770 i agree the perf gain itselif is not much but the lows are miles better and the threads keep more control of the stutter.
will be giving him my 5600x board and ram when i upgrade to am5 so its all good, just somthing temp so he can play.
i'm not surprised this is good value, these(hp z490) are EVERYWHERE i have seen them at lot in my classrooms and lot of schools and organisations seem to like them!
Yeah loads on eBay at the moment
I have this same PC, xeon e5 1620v2, 4x8GB ddr3, new PSU, RX580, 1 250 SSD for OS, 1 250GB nvme for gaming files (via pci card slot adapter) and 2 1TB 3.5 HDDs for data storage, a standard PSU needs some diy mods to hold it in place but it is worth it.
i managed to get a bargin proper gaming pc from cash converters. it is an asus gl12 with a i5-8400 and a 1060 3gb for a total of £260. i couldnt believe the price i paid for a pc that was a whole grand a few years ago. goodluck with the pc!
The xeons can be had real cheap for these and give a good boost to performance. That's really all it needs to keep that budget feel. You really don't want to be adding new psu, and video card, adapters at that point you should've just started a new build from scratch. Id love to see it upgraded though.
I upgraded a t3500 I got for like $80. Had 2x8 ddr3, so I added another 8gb and ran in triple channel. Upgraded the i7 to a xeon 6c/12t for $20 which performed very close to a ryzen 5 2600. There was a higher core higher clock xeon but was too expensive for me. The t3500 i had came with a tower cooler that I added 2 fans to(zip ties) Added a ssd and a 1650 super with a 6 pin(psu came with it) it runs great.
I got the z600. Similar issues when it comes to limitation of power supply. The difference is I have a background that is in electrical and electronic engineering along with nuclear and CS. So I just modified the power supply to do what I needed. To be clear that isn't something anyone should do unless they know what they are doing! Seriously. But it is an option for those with the skills.
Just built a system with an AliExpress X79 board, the E5-1650v2 clocked @ 4.1Ghz, 16gb DDR3 1866Mhz, and Asus Strix R9 390 8gb for about $250 USD. Performs decent for aging hardware. Only downside is high temps and power draw from the R9 390.
Until recently, I'd been surviving this way for the last 15 years. Last time I upgraded a 16GB Z210 for 2077. I used the stock PSU and worked out the power budget by comparing against GPU upgrades sold directly from HP - Wikipedia nicely documents GPU core power consumption for comparison. The only thing that stopped me from upgrading to the latest generation of GPUs was the 6 pin power connector.
Love my Z440 build to this day.
If you use windows 10 21h1 or earlier, you can overclock the E5-1650, 1660 and 1680 v0/v2 CPUs, they also support ECC Reg dimms, I have 128GB 1866Mhz in mine and I could clock it to 4.1Ghz all core. Also ran just fine with a titan X Pascal with a dodgy 6 pin splitter.
Z420 w/ 64GB is incredible find for that price. Still using equal Z-series with less memory for work and this is incredible machine, build like a tank. Just add SSD and decent GPU like gtx1060/6gb or 1660ti/super and it's still ok as long as you don't play newest games. With my old GOG-games and mainly strategy-titles this machine just flies.
This Xeon has an unlocked multiplier, mine ran at around 4.5ghz 24/7, back when I still had it
compared to a normal desktop at a similar price point these things are a way better value. quad channel ram + more cores and you're able to use a wider variety of cards thanks to the psu. got something a little newer that's haswell based and i intend to use it for video editing in the near future.
I love a pimped out old pc!
I have a HP Elitedesk 800 G2 (tower version) with an i7 and just got the power supply adapter to turn it into my living room VR machine. It was free and has an i7-6700 in it with 32GB of DDR4 and a 1TB spinner in it. I got a WD Blue 1 TB SATA SSD for $60, a GTX 1660 Super for $108 on eBay, $7 for the power supply adapter, and $55 for a 550W PSU. For $230 I still shake my head at the $3k+ I have in my main PC when businesses are throwing out perfectly good systems simply because they aren't Windows 11 compatible (just a quick Rufus USB drive away from running 11 anyway).
Exactly the same Z420 got my GF from me years ago. It was supposed to be scrapped because in the policy of the company I got it from (ant worked as external it technician) said, that every PC who is older than 4 years has to be replaced. Only the harddisk needs to be destroyed. So I take it with me and made a gaming pc.
Sadly, the PSU ist proprietary and taller than the usual ones. So you has to stick with it unless you might get a better one from HP.
lot of sellers on ebay have clocked that these old units are getting reused for gaming and accordingly have bumped up the prices which is a shame as it puts more people off geting one and geting more use out it
It runs a lot better than I thought it would.
That liquid cooler thing works surprisingly well, I wonder why we don't see more of them these days.
An Ivy Bridge based 6c12t is still a very decent cpu. Especially since games are actually utilizing the extra threads a bit more now.
The 2667 v2 in here would be cool. or a z440 with 2667v3.