Old Workstation Revival! $375 BF5 Machine

[XeonKyle]

EDIT 23 February 2019:

-Replaced VRM fan with Arctic F9 PWM

-PC beeped at me and required me to press F1 on boot because I was using an arctic 4pin CPU fan instead of their proprietary 5pin connector so i soldered the old plug to the new fan

-Added 6 to 8 pin GPU adapter

-------------------------------------------------------------

-Xeon W3690 (6c12t @4.133GHz)

-MSI RX480 4GB Armour Edition

-24GB(6x4) Mystery DDR3

-512GB Micron 1100 SSD in M.2 to 2.5inch adapter

-Stock HP Z400 everything else

 

I’ve gamed casually on and off, mainly World of Tanks, Battlefield 2, and Skyrim on an old toshiba laptop with an A4-3300m APU. Horrendous, I know, but recently I purchased a Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming with a 960M for college and my desire to play games was revived. The poor 960M had no chance of playing BF5 so I set out to build a worthy machine out of eBay parts.

 

I started with an old HP z400. It came with a trusty Xeon and 24 gigs of ram, but was lacking in the cooling and graphics department. A few days later I had an Arctic A30 cooler and an RX480 in the mail. I OC’ed the processor from 3.466 to 4.133GHz with no problem on Throttlestop, and is even stable at stock voltages! I did however remove the side panel and mount the rear casefan up against the motherboard to suck air past the VRM’s and blow away the hot air from the giant cooler. I have to leave the sidepanel off to fit the cooler, but looks aren’t usually the goal in a budget build. It is a stock PSU, and I’m using a 6pin connector on an 8pin card, so I left the GPU close to stock clocks to be safe. To top it off, I purchased a Micron 1100 512GB SSD. It comes in an M.2 form factor, so I put it in a cheap m.2 to 2.5 inch drive adapter.

 

All in all, I get ~50° CPU in BF5 and the GPU stays cool enough to run at full boost clock. I run BF5 ~100 FPS with mostly High and a couple settings on Medium, but I only have a 75hz 1080p monitor so I could crank the settings slightly more.

 

$219.40 - Z400 Workstation

$81.75 - RX480 Armour Edition

$13.55 - Arctic A30 Cooler

$61.47 - Micron 1100 512GB SSD + Adapter

TOTAL-$376.17

Original photo:

Spoiler

 

[Ashleyyyy]

nice! old xeon hardware is the best if you want price/performance. 

too bad it's old and therefore unreliable. my dual-X5650 rig died a few weeks ago  

[XeonKyle]

27 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

nice! old xeon hardware is the best if you want price/performance. 

too bad it's old and therefore unreliable. my dual-X5650 rig died a few weeks ago  

What went wrong with it?

i was considering making this a Z800 build and running dual x5687’s but I figured I’d be better off with a simpler single CPU setup.

[Ashleyyyy]

1 minute ago, XeonKyle said:

What went wrong with it?

no clue. i was gaming and it just turned off. i'll be taking the ram and cpu's out, test them in another board and then sell all of it. after that i don't trust it anymore. 

[Animal901]

Ive got a z400 and mine came with a heat pipe heat sink.  did you pull the board and pry the plate off? it wasn't taped? how much cooler is the artic one?

[XeonKyle]

On 2/11/2019 at 12:27 AM, Animal901 said:

Ive got a z400 and mine came with a heat pipe heat sink.  did you pull the board and pry the plate off? it wasn't taped? how much cooler is the artic one?

I left the backplate on and got some screws from the hardware store that would fit it and the new cooler properly. If you’re looking for a cooler, the Arctic Freezer 13 would be a good choice.

[Emanbaird]

OP how did you get the w3690 to 4+ GHz? FSB or baseclock oc? or do these have unlocked multiplayer's 

[XeonKyle]

On 2/16/2019 at 10:37 AM, Emanbaird said:

OP how did you get the w3690 to 4+ GHz? FSB or baseclock oc? or do these have unlocked multiplayer's 

It has an unlocked multiplier, but it cannot be accessed from BIOS on the z400, you must use a program such as ThrottleStop to edit the multiplier values. Don’t forget to also increase the max watt and max amp values in TS or it will throttle, 130W is definitely not enough. 

 

For reference, mine is stable at 4.133GHz, but I have a 92mm fan pointed directly at the VRM’s to cool them off and a 320W rated cpu cooler.

[Emanbaird]

This is amazing, I wonder if anyone can mod the BIOS, or how good the VRM's are on this board. With how cheap these are they make excellent machines.

[XeonKyle]

4 minutes ago, Emanbaird said:

This is amazing, I wonder if anyone can mod the BIOS, or how good the VRM's are on this board. With how cheap these are they make excellent machines.

They deserve more love, but I doubt anyone would mod the bios on a board this old. I’d love to get a thermal camera to see what exactly is going on. 

[Emanbaird]

Just now, XeonKyle said:

They deserve more love, but I doubt anyone would mod the bios on a board this old. I’d love to get a thermal camera to see what exactly is going on. 

I'm probably gonna pick one up soon. Too useful for overclocking especially on my shady boards 

[XeonKyle]

Just now, Emanbaird said:

I'm probably gonna pick one up soon. Too useful for overclocking especially on my shady boards 

Do you have a build thread for your z400? If you get that thermal cam I’d love to see how your project turns out.

[Emanbaird]

2 minutes ago, XeonKyle said:

Do you have a build thread for your z400? If you get that thermal cam I’d love to see how your project turns out.

I don't have it anymore, i gave it away to a friend but they are 300 miles away from me now, I might get another for my cousin. Pretty much my favorite thing to do with them is drop an SSD and rx480 in one, spend less than $300 and plays pretty much everything, but the CPU was always the biggest bottleneck.

[Lagercat1]

where did you find a 480 for so cheap?

 

[XeonKyle]

@82223 eBay. The dude had a bunch for sale but they're all gone now. They 4GB's pop up around 85-95 all the time on there if you keep an eye out. More for 8GB models but 4 gigs is all a 480 really needs at 1080p anyways.

[Lagercat1]

@XeonKyle Ah I gotcha, ill keep looking on ebay for one bc im trying to build my brother a gaming pc for his b day. 

[XeonKyle]

Replaced all of those old white zipties with smaller black ones(thanks dollar tree!!) and was even able to use a couple to fix my RX480 from sagging. Relocated SSD to to top compartment to fix the jumble of cables. It’s not perfect, but it’s mine