Best prebuilt tower cheap

[frankr2994]

Hey I was just wondering if someone knows of a better deal out there. I usually only buy refurbished computers and I think I'm getting a good deal when I do buy so for my next little project I would like to put together an anything machine. What I mean is I don't just game or run code I run a bunch of different software,game,write code encode videos ect. So the best tower deal I can find right now is a Dell precision t5810. Something like a e5-1650v3 or v4 can be attained reasonably, it runs ddr4 ecc memory has a bunch of pcie slots and xeon has 40 lanes and I believe the motherboard supports nvme booting. I'm still looking around but it seems like I can have a system minus w/e GPU I want for around 500 bucks.  They are sold with anything from a nvs 315 to a Quadro k2000 . So knowing this does anyone know of something else that seems like a great deal? I've always been partial to Dell because of driver and os support which it seems like they keep updating forever almost. ( My Dell e6430 has documented drivers for windows xp through 10 and just got a new bios like last month)

[SupaKomputa]

Why don't you build it yourself? ECC DDR are slow, they don't do much for coding / video editing.

[mariushm]

$500 is a lot for a refurbished pc.

e5 1650 v3 / v4 is just a bit more powerful than a Ryzen 5 1600 which costs 100$ in stores. You have dedicated 4 lanes for the M.2 ssd, 16 pci-e lanes for video card  and you have a few pci-e lanes from chipset (8 lanes for x470 chipset, 6 for the b450 boards, which means you have at least a pci-e x16 / x4 electrical and 1-3 pci-e x1 slots). x470 based boards allow you to split the x16 from cpu to 2 x8 slots.

So just a bit slower with this 100$ cpu, but upside is you have lots of room to upgrade.

 

Here's a 400$ machine, without video card:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz 6-Core Processor	$101.00 @ Amazon
Motherboard	ASRock B450M Steel Legend Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	$84.99 @ Newegg
Memory	G.Skill Aegis 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	$109.99 @ Newegg
Case	Cougar MX330 ATX Mid Tower Case	$44.99 @ Amazon
Power Supply	EVGA 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply	$71.88 @ OutletPC
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$432.85
	Mail-in rebates	-$20.00
	Total	$412.85
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-10-21 05:55 EDT-0400

 

If you absolutely need LOTS of pci-e lanes, you can look at Threadripper.

Threadripper 3 is about to show up in a month or so. Current motherboards will be on sale pretty soon, because those new Threadrippers will come in two varieties, and one of those will need new motherboards. So expect current boards with discounts, sales etc.

You can get a 1900x for around 170$, and the cheapest board is around 250$, but you'll probably find them for 200$ soon. 

You get 64 pci-e lanes, 4 locked to chipset, 60 going to m.2 slots and pci-e slots.

 

[frankr2994]

Never really got into looking at amd but I really like what that thread ripper brings. I looked at some boards last night and like you said about 250 at the min. I can't see a reason why I would ever need more than that 1900x and that's about the same price I could buy a used xeon v4. I'm going to start playing on PC part picker to see what I can put together. One of the 250 dollar boards I seen had 4 x16 slots 2 m2 slots and 8 sata 3 ports. That's pretty loaded lol. End result id like to have a few vms running all the time one as a backup server one with GPU passthrough and one for nonsense that I can just scrub every once in a while. Thanks for the info. I still won't stop buying refurbished though but I mostly get laptops for friends, family and work. Can't really "build" those.

[mariushm]

19 minutes ago, frankr2994 said:

I can't see a reason why I would ever need more than that 1900x and that's about the same price I could buy a used xeon v4. I'm going to start playing on PC part picker to see what I can put together. One of the 250 dollar boards I seen had 4 x16 slots 2 m2 slots and 8 sata 3 ports. That's pretty loaded lol. End result id like to have a few vms running all the time one as a backup server one with GPU passthrough and one for nonsense that I can just scrub every once in a while. Thanks for the info. I still won't stop buying refurbished though but I mostly get laptops for friends, family and work. Can't really "build" those.

More cores can be useful for virtual machines. Give each VM 2 or 4 cores and passthrough to a pci-e slot if you need a video card for OpenCL/Cuda or hardware encoding of videos.

Also keep in mind a lot of these Threadripper boards support pci-e bifurcation, so you could for example split a pci-e x16 into 4 x4 and install 4 M.2 SSDs in a single slot using an adapter card.