Munx wrote on 2023-10-10, 10:18:

My office decided to get rid of a lot of some older inventory and auctioned it off to the staff. Got a bunch of desktops for a f […]
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My office decided to get rid of a lot of some older inventory and auctioned it off to the staff. Got a bunch of desktops for a few euros each. Most were previously given to people during covid to work from home and the outsides took quite a beating in those couple years.

Disassembled a few and they are all more or less the same - small h110 LGA1151 motherboards, 16G 2133 DDR4 memory, 120-240G SSD, i5 6400-6500.

One use case for these I had was to upgrade my current home office/light gaming PC, which is running a sandybridge xeon (essentially i7 2600).

You'd think that with 2 manufacturing and 4 whole CPU generations, the newer CPU would be noticeably better, even when its a tier-down from an i7, but no. Looking through benchmarks I saw that the sandybridge i7 gets slightly less average frames, but higher 1% lows vs i5 6500. Whats even worse is that I cant even get a meaningful upgrade for this platform later down the line since Intel decided to cuck early 1151 adopters by not releasing 6+core CPUs for these early gen chipsets.

Really goes to show what happens when a large company does not have any competition and gets too comfortable. Thank god for Ryzen.

Guess I'm sticking with sandybridge for now.

I don't know if it's any use, but you might be able to get an officially unsupported Xeon working with firmware mods... https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments … ork_on_my_asus/

Munx wrote on 2023-10-10, 10:18:

You'd think that with 2 manufacturing and 4 whole CPU generations, the newer CPU would be noticeably better, even when its a tier-down from an i7, but no. Looking through benchmarks I saw that the sandybridge i7 gets slightly less average frames, but higher 1% lows vs i5 6500. Whats even worse is that I cant even get a meaningful upgrade for this platform later down the line since Intel decided to cuck early 1151 adopters by not releasing 6+core CPUs for these early gen chipsets.

Really goes to show what happens when a large company does not have any competition and gets too comfortable. Thank god for Ryzen.

Guess I'm sticking with sandybridge for now.

Yeah, wasn't until Coffe Lake (8th gen) that you could get 6 or more cores in LGA115x unfortunately. Must have cost Intel some, that "enthusiast on a budget" couldn't have their performance cravings met, being budget limited away from Socket 2011 ..

Bought a 6GiB Asus GTX1060 for the kid, to build him a more gaming-appropriate rig than his laptop, which has integrated GPU in an 11th gen i5 😀 Cost a hair's width more than US$100. Going to put it in a Lenovo Workstation with a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1270 and 12 GiB of DDR3 memory. All which I had laying around from decomissioned system at former work place... Gaming on a budget 🤣

Mainly it's for Counter Strike and Roblox games - I know very well that CyberPunk 2097 won't fly on that rig 😉

Guy’s, The HP z440 is one of the Most Versatile HP computers there is. You can use it as a Workstation, Business computer, Gaming computer, NAS, File Server, PLEX server, Media Server, etc…….It Officially Supports Win-10 and Linux.

No Windows License key required. It just Activates itself.

I have mine setup as a NAS with 8 Sata Hard drives and a PCIe NVMe Boot drive.
I purchased a 4-bay hard drive cage on eBay.

The Motherboard has a PCI slot so you can install old Sound Cards. ( I am Still using the Audigy 2ZS from 1998 )
I have installed a 5.25 LG Blu-ray drive for watching 4k movies.

This computer is Very Versatile.

Has a 700 watt PSU so you can install a Modern Video Card just buy the Video card adapter cables ( Dual female 6pin to Male 8pin )

Works with SAS/Sata HBA controller adapters from LSI or Adaptec. ( LSI 9300i )
For a total of 14 hard drives or More with a 16 drive HBA adapter for a total of 22 hard drives.

This computer is ROCK Solid and Stable. Never Crashes.

Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads ) 3.2ghz base clock and turbo boost to 3.8ghz.

Memory 2133p ECC DDR4 ( up to 256gb )

It’s NOT the Fastest computer but it performs well and is Very Stable and Reliable.
More than Fast enough for most programs and applications and games.

These sell for about $120 on eBay. Best deal on eBay for a Powerful Versatile computer.

I picked up a Titan Z. It can play Doom and Pac-man A-OK. It's too slow to play Batman Arkam Knight with all the bells and whistles enabled at 90FPS, though, even at 1024x768.

Ordered an OBi302 on eBay so I can connect two of my laptops to it: 1 for faxing and the other for calls/BBS.

Gotta get RJ11 phone cords and an ethernet non-managed hub so I can connect the OBi302 to it and my work laptop to the same home network.

Not too long ago, got HP elitedesk 800 G3 mini and upgraded both CPU and ram to i7-7700 and 32GB, sata SSD for now. Much faster than my fully upgraded HP Z220. Perfect for web browsing.

Plan to put in NVME SSD once comes in. Made by Micron by the way. For OEM market.

Updated Micron 2300 2TB NVME SSD came in and installed with chinese NVME copper heatsink, these silly red silicone rubber bands that came with this kit is good tension and 3 thermal pad thicknesses is used to cool the NVME SSD. Barely fits but works good!

Cheers,

Got an HP OfficeJet 5258 MFP from a thrift store so I can connect it to the fax line on my OBi302 (got Google Voice setup and the second line decided to lose its number since it got ported to another system somehow, but it'll get fixed soon) and connect it to a laptop so I can BBS, dial in, and fax on it as well in case the OfficeJet is powered off or dies mysteriously.

A relative left me a very basic socket AM4 motherboard and RAM from some gaming PC. He had already upgraded.
I was avoiding spending money on it but I finally bought a Ryzen 3600 for it. It should replace my current gaming PC which is a 10 year old Dell Xeon. This in turn would let me use the Xeon as my daily.

Turns out there's no backplate for the AM4 heatsink. The heatsink doesn't come with that, I guess it was supposed to come with the motherboard.

I tried going to a local PC repair shop, thinking they surely must have some backplates. They said no.
I'm suspecting what that really means is they're not willing to sell components from the back, they only want to sell the retail packaged junk up front.
So that's a disappointment - I had a really good repair shop near me when I lived in CA that would always sell me random little parts like that. They'd make up a fair price on the spot, and sometimes I'd buy more random stuff as a result. It made them a lot more useful than corporate retail stores for some things. We also had Fry's (which is gone now).

It's sad to me that there's no way to buy basic components like this anymore except the internet. So I went back to Amazon to buy that silly backplate. Since I neglected to include it when I bought the CPU, I had to make up another $30 worth of stuff to buy just so I'd get free shipping. I guess the backplate will be here next week.

Every store I've known across multiple hobby interests that stopped selling the small stuff to concentrate on big ticket items has gone down the drain a year or two after they pissed off 90% of their clientele with that stupid idea and they went elsewhere.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-10-11, 05:44:

Bought a 6GiB Asus GTX1060 for the kid, to build him a more gaming-appropriate rig than his laptop, which has integrated GPU in an 11th gen i5 😀 Cost a hair's width more than US$100. Going to put it in a Lenovo Workstation with a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1270 and 12 GiB of DDR3 memory. All which I had laying around from decomissioned system at former work place... Gaming on a budget 🤣

Mainly it's for Counter Strike and Roblox games - I know very well that CyberPunk 2097 won't fly on that rig 😉

Eh you'd be surprised. Cyberpunk on low 1080p would fly. Not counting the Phantom Liberty update 🤣

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-10-11, 05:44:

Bought a 6GiB Asus GTX1060 for the kid, to build him a more gaming-appropriate rig than his laptop, which has integrated GPU in an 11th gen i5 😀 Cost a hair's width more than US$100. Going to put it in a Lenovo Workstation with a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1270 and 12 GiB of DDR3 memory. All which I had laying around from decomissioned system at former work place... Gaming on a budget 🤣

Mainly it's for Counter Strike and Roblox games - I know very well that CyberPunk 2097 won't fly on that rig 😉

Sounds an awful lot like my current gaming PC, an old Dell with a Xeon E3-1245 and a GTX1080 I added more recently when the graphics card price bubble burst a while back. I had to drill out the drive cage to get the card to fit, and it's probably held back by the CPU.
It's been good for me but I only play a few particular games.

I built for me and my wife X58 based systems last year for cheap. Asus sabertooth X58, Xeon X5675, 16 gigs DDR 3 1600, 500 gig Corsair MX500 gig sata sad, 1tb PNY XLR8 NVME drives is pcie adapters, Corsair rm850 pay, EVGA RTX 3050 XC in mine and a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Vision OC for hers, 240mm aio cpu coolers. Phanteks g360a case for hers CM CM690 for mine( I had that case since 09) it's a place holder for now. I built both systems for just under 2 grand and they are awesome every task and game just fly on them. I will be ordering 2 Xeon X5690's as a nice upgrade then will be over cooking them to 4.2ghz with the ram at 1866 and we'll be set for quite a while. We did start collecting parts to do a custom water loop for her system and eventually for mine.

Upgrades to my HP z440.
I put a Sata SSD and PCIe Sata Adapter in it.
Works Great.
I have my computer setup up with this Sata SSD ( win-11) and an NVMe PCIe SSD ( win-10).
I have it setup to Dual Boot Win-11 or Win-10.
Win-11 is the Primary Boot drive. It boots off the Win-11 SSD and I get to this Menu so I can choose which OS to Boot into.
Works great.
Win-11 is NOT Officially supported on this PC but Everything appears to be working fine with the Default Win-11 drivers.
But if I was to Build this again I would have selected the “HP z4-G4 computer” which Officially supports Win-11
So this computer will have to do for now.

shamino wrote on 2023-10-27, 08:54:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-10-11, 05:44:

Bought a 6GiB Asus GTX1060 for the kid, to build him a more gaming-appropriate rig than his laptop, which has integrated GPU in an 11th gen i5 😀 Cost a hair's width more than US$100. Going to put it in a Lenovo Workstation with a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1270 and 12 GiB of DDR3 memory. All which I had laying around from decomissioned system at former work place... Gaming on a budget 🤣

Mainly it's for Counter Strike and Roblox games - I know very well that CyberPunk 2097 won't fly on that rig 😉

Sounds an awful lot like my current gaming PC, an old Dell with a Xeon E3-1245 and a GTX1080 I added more recently when the graphics card price bubble burst a while back. I had to drill out the drive cage to get the card to fit, and it's probably held back by the CPU.
It's been good for me but I only play a few particular games.

Well, I have some challenges with space as well. RAM needs to be installed before graphics card - the only available PCIe x1 is blocked by the cooler of the graphics card - and the tool free installation bracket for expansion cards needs some tinkering when installing. But a capable gaming machine for that little money, it's a game in it self 🤣

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2023-10-27, 11:53:

I built for me and my wife X58 based systems last year for cheap. Asus sabertooth X58, Xeon X5675, 16 gigs DDR 3 1600, 500 gig Corsair MX500 gig sata sad, 1tb PNY XLR8 NVME drives is pcie adapters, Corsair rm850 pay, EVGA RTX 3050 XC in mine and a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Vision OC for hers, 240mm aio cpu coolers. Phanteks g360a case for hers CM CM690 for mine( I had that case since 09) it's a place holder for now. I built both systems for just under 2 grand and they are awesome every task and game just fly on them. I will be ordering 2 Xeon X5690's as a nice upgrade then will be over cooking them to 4.2ghz with the ram at 1866 and we'll be set for quite a while. We did start collecting parts to do a custom water loop for her system and eventually for mine.

Is "over cooking" a deliberately chosen word or an auto correction of overclocking? Either way, I love that term and might be using it myself 🤣

I also have a couple of X58 boards lying around - and both some Xeon as well as an i7-970 waiting for me in Oregon ...

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-10-27, 22:43:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2023-10-27, 11:53:

I built for me and my wife X58 based systems last year for cheap. Asus sabertooth X58, Xeon X5675, 16 gigs DDR 3 1600, 500 gig Corsair MX500 gig sata sad, 1tb PNY XLR8 NVME drives is pcie adapters, Corsair rm850 pay, EVGA RTX 3050 XC in mine and a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Vision OC for hers, 240mm aio cpu coolers. Phanteks g360a case for hers CM CM690 for mine( I had that case since 09) it's a place holder for now. I built both systems for just under 2 grand and they are awesome every task and game just fly on them. I will be ordering 2 Xeon X5690's as a nice upgrade then will be over cooking them to 4.2ghz with the ram at 1866 and we'll be set for quite a while. We did start collecting parts to do a custom water loop for her system and eventually for mine.

Is "over cooking" a deliberately chosen word or an auto correction of overclocking? Either way, I love that term and might be using it myself 🤣

I also have a couple of X58 boards lying around - and both some Xeon as well as an i7-970 waiting for me in Oregon ...

Nope that was fully auto correct. With the 240mm AIOs even the overclocked X5675s @3.8ghz stay under 45C under load. I might use that term with the newest cpus from Intel and AMD

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2023-10-27, 11:53:

I built for me and my wife X58 based systems last year for cheap. Asus sabertooth X58, Xeon X5675, 16 gigs DDR 3 1600, 500 gig Corsair MX500 gig sata sad, 1tb PNY XLR8 NVME drives is pcie adapters, Corsair rm850 pay, EVGA RTX 3050 XC in mine and a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Vision OC for hers, 240mm aio cpu coolers. Phanteks g360a case for hers CM CM690 for mine( I had that case since 09) it's a place holder for now. I built both systems for just under 2 grand and they are awesome every task and game just fly on them. I will be ordering 2 Xeon X5690's as a nice upgrade then will be over cooking them to 4.2ghz with the ram at 1866 and we'll be set for quite a while. We did start collecting parts to do a custom water loop for her system and eventually for mine.

What OS do you use with these ?

bestemor wrote on 2023-10-28, 01:10:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2023-10-27, 11:53:

I built for me and my wife X58 based systems last year for cheap. Asus sabertooth X58, Xeon X5675, 16 gigs DDR 3 1600, 500 gig Corsair MX500 gig sata sad, 1tb PNY XLR8 NVME drives is pcie adapters, Corsair rm850 pay, EVGA RTX 3050 XC in mine and a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Vision OC for hers, 240mm aio cpu coolers. Phanteks g360a case for hers CM CM690 for mine( I had that case since 09) it's a place holder for now. I built both systems for just under 2 grand and they are awesome every task and game just fly on them. I will be ordering 2 Xeon X5690's as a nice upgrade then will be over cooking them to 4.2ghz with the ram at 1866 and we'll be set for quite a while. We did start collecting parts to do a custom water loop for her system and eventually for mine.

What OS do you use with these ?

Windows 10 currently but will probably update to windows 11 by this time next year.
The systems really are still quite powerful for daily tasks as well as gaming.

Work sucks and won't give me the opportunity to continue to develop my technical skills or keep up to date, so I've ended up buying enough kit to set up a home lab:

Circa 2016ish Dell PowerEdge T430
- 2x Xeon E5-2660 v4 (14c/28t, 35mb, 2.0-3.2ghz)
- 192gb ddr4 2400
- 8x 256gb ssd in raid10

Just started putting VMware 8 on it and building out the core infrastructure (dns, DHCP, pxe, LDAP, nfs etc).