xeon Good Deal? Potential?

[Rehx]

Hey Everyone!

 

So a recently nabbed a t3600 workstation from a friend for $150.  It has a xeon E-1603, 8GB of DDR3 1633(I think), 3HDD in raid to make ~930GB space, and a firepro2200 (something doodoo). I was wondering if this is a good deal.  I plan on switching out the FirePro for a GTX 960 and upgrading the ram to 16GB. The machine will 90% of the time be used for Adobe Lightroom as it will be my wifes workstation pc for editing. (Maybe she could do some light gaming as well?)

 

Let me know your thoughts and ideas. Am I going the right way with upgrading? Did I buy a turnip?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Looks like a good deal

 

Id put a xeon e5 2670 in there. Its about 80 bucks for a 8 core ~2.2ghz cpu

 

Id put 32gb of ddr3 ecc in(cheap on ebay)

 

960 looks good,

 

Id get a ssd and get those drive out of a raid0 into a raid 5 atleast

[Rehx]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Looks like a good deal

 

Id put a xeon e5 2670 in there. Its about 80 bucks for a 8 core ~2.2ghz cpu

 

Id put 32gb of ddr3 ecc in(cheap on ebay)

 

960 looks good,

 

Id get a ssd and get those drive out of a raid0 into a raid 5 atleast

Sweet.  I'll deff look into that 2670.  Should I bother water cooling at all or just a good air cooling heat sink?  32 might be overkill but wth.. why not lol

 

Im nervous about messing with the HDDs. They all look like they connect to a card on the mobo in a PCI slot - this is my first workstation kind of computer and the bios is a bit confusing (don't want to break the new toy).

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Infinite_J said:

Sweet.  I'll deff look into that 2670.  Should I bother water cooling at all or just a good air cooling heat sink?  32 might be overkill but wth.. why not lol

 

Im nervous about messing with the HDDs. They all look like they connect to a card on the mobo in a PCI slot - this is my first workstation kind of computer and the bios is a bit confusing (don't want to break the new toy).

They have good heatsinks and are almost silent under load(I haved used them in class).

 

your not gonna break the drives, but you can lose data if you set it wrong(im assuming it empty now.

 

Id probabaly get a 250gb ssd, install windows/linux on there and then store photos on the hdd in a raid5.

[Miguel Batista]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Looks like a good deal

 

Id put a xeon e5 2670 in there. Its about 80 bucks for a 8 core ~2.2ghz cpu

 

Id put 32gb of ddr3 ecc in(cheap on ebay)

 

960 looks good,

 

Id get a ssd and get those drive out of a raid0 into a raid 5 atleast

This. Really good advice here.

 

For productivity work, I would try and get a larger ssd where your wife can keep her current project since it will increase speeds in photo editing somewhat.

 

BTW, for editing, mo ram is mo better. Sizes can get really.big really quick and if you go into the HDD, you will notice a drop in speed. As for the HDD in question, worst case scenario, you will have to format them and reinstall is if you mess up. You can't damage other components so go Rambo on it.