What do you think of these crazy speced eBay workstation PCs for ~$500?

[pangaea]

So I've seen a couple of these up on eBay, example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-Xeon-Dual-X5650-2-66GHz-48GB-RAM-3X120gb-SSD-12-Core/163305566748?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20180518101550%26meid%3D37cb5fcb4c5049fb894602300e4540b5%26pid%3D100970%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D163305566748%26itm%3D163305566748&_trksid=p2481888.c100970.m5481&_trkparms=pageci%3A774639bd-cc9e-11e8-982b-74dbd1805bb6|parentrq%3A5e8671d01660a99c423a7ab8ffec5a15|iid%3A1

In case it goes down the title is "HP Z800 Workstation Xeon Dual X5650 2.66GHz 48GB RAM 3X120gb SSD 12 Core" and in the description "Up for sale: HP Z800 12 Core dual hexcore Xeon X5650 workstation. 48gb DDR3 ECC RAM - HP Original parts. 3x 120gb SSD in RAID5. USB 3.1 Card. AMD Firepro v3800. Workstation upgradable to dual Intel Xeon X5690." it's $500 + shipping

 

So this seems like it would be a pretty kickass home server. I suppose you could always drop in whatever videocard you want and make it a gaming PC but it really sounds like overkill just for gaming. I thought this was a pretty neat find, what are your thoughts on it?

[RollTime]

2 minutes ago, pangaea said:

So I've seen a couple of these up on eBay, example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-Xeon-Dual-X5650-2-66GHz-48GB-RAM-3X120gb-SSD-12-Core/163305566748?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20180518101550%26meid%3D37cb5fcb4c5049fb894602300e4540b5%26pid%3D100970%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D163305566748%26itm%3D163305566748&_trksid=p2481888.c100970.m5481&_trkparms=pageci%3A774639bd-cc9e-11e8-982b-74dbd1805bb6|parentrq%3A5e8671d01660a99c423a7ab8ffec5a15|iid%3A1

In case it goes down the title is "HP Z800 Workstation Xeon Dual X5650 2.66GHz 48GB RAM 3X120gb SSD 12 Core" and in the description "Up for sale: HP Z800 12 Core dual hexcore Xeon X5650 workstation. 48gb DDR3 ECC RAM - HP Original parts. 3x 120gb SSD in RAID5. USB 3.1 Card. AMD Firepro v3800. Workstation upgradable to dual Intel Xeon X5690." it's $500 + shipping

 

So this seems like it would be a pretty kickass home server. I suppose you could always drop in whatever videocard you want and make it a gaming PC but it really sounds like overkill just for gaming. I thought this was a pretty neat find, what are your thoughts on it?

The price makes me suspicious. I'd be careful.

[Fasauceome]

If you buy it and something's amiss, you can of course return it with ebay's buyer protection. Of course, a home server hardly needs this many cores and threads, or this much ram. 

[porina]

It is old which I think explains the price, and I'm not even sure it is a good price. DDR3 ECC registered ram is very cheap as hardly anything outside servers use it. The Xeons are very old. 120GB SSDs aren't expensive any more, and if they're used are practically worthless.

[pangaea]

Just now, RollTime said:

The price makes me suspicious. I'd be careful.

It's not uncommon to see amazing deals on workstation hardware (especially ones with VERY minor issues like a busted hard drive), probably because the kind of people who buy workstations don't mind paying to have the latest and greatest, but this is probably one of the craziest I've seen for sure. 

[pangaea]

5 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

If you buy it and something's amiss, you can of course return it with ebay's buyer protection. Of course, a home server hardly needs this many cores and threads, or this much ram. 

What if you run a large Minecraft server on it or something along those lines?

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, pangaea said:

What if you run a large Minecraft server on it or something along those lines?

That would be useful, for some reason I had a storage server in mind.

[FloRolf]

The power consumption for both a storage server (totally overkill for that aswell) and a Minecraft server (???) is too damn high. 

[Spotty]

Both CPUs are probably worth about $50.
The 48GB of DDR3 ECC RAM (12x4GB) is probably only worth about $200-$300. Realistically there's not a lot of people who will be buying DDR3 ECC RAM these days, so the prices are pretty low.

Edit: Looking on eBay there's a bunch of 4x4GB (16GB) DDR3 kits for sale from China for USD $40-$50. So prices could be even lower than my initial estimate.
 

5 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

That would be useful, for some reason I had a storage server in mind.

Pretty overkill for a storage server.

[Taswell]

Im not surprised these are probably some decommissioned servers that are 4-5 years old that some one is trying to get rid of or something. Old servers are usually pretty cheap since the form factors are weird and replacement parts are usually expensive

[pangaea]

5 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Both CPUs are probably worth about $50.
The 48GB of DDR3 ECC RAM (12x4GB) is probably only worth about $200-$300. Realistically there's not a lot of people who will be buying DDR3 ECC RAM these days, so the prices are pretty low.

Edit: Looking on eBay there's a bunch of 4x4GB (16GB) DDR3 kits for sale from China for USD $40-$50. So prices could be even lower than my initial estimate.
 

Pretty overkill for a storage server.

A lot of hobbyists do buy old workstation/server hardware for budget gaming PCs and home servers. The spec to price ratio can't be beat with regular consumer hardware.

[Quadriplegic]

Those Xeons are around $30 each used, 3 120 GB SSDs will be roughly $85 new.

I'll go and say that working motherboard would be most valuable part of those builds

[pangaea]

18 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

The power consumption for both a storage server (totally overkill for that aswell) and a Minecraft server (???) is too damn high. 

The difference in your electric bill would be nothing compared to what it would cost to rent a similar spec dedicated server.

[Coaxialgamer]

These are older workstations , meant for businesses and the like .

The hardware itself isn't that expensive anymore , which is why it's so cheap (relatively). An x5650 can be had for less than 50$, and is only equivalent to a modern quad core in terms of performance. It just uses a fair bit of power and spreads that performance across 12 threads. It's not a bad chip , it's just not as fast as the core count might make it seem.

 

Many businesses are starting to retire this class of hardware , and when that happens the machines usually end up on ebay or the like.

 

there's no doubt in my mind that this is legit . Just don't expect it to beat a modern -anything- in gaming

[pangaea]

2 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

These are older workstations , meant for businesses and the like .

The hardware itself isn't that expensive anymore , which is why it's so cheap (relatively). An x5650 can be had for less than 50$, and is only equivalent to a modern quad core in terms of performance. It just uses a fair bit of power and spreads that performance across 12 threads. It's not a bad chip , it's just not as fast as the core count might make it seem.

 

Many businesses are starting to retire this class of hardware , and when that happens the machines usually end up on ebay or the like.

 

there's no doubt in my mind that this is legit . Just don't expect it to beat a modern -anything- in gaming

The price-to-performance ratio of used workstation hardware is usually pretty good. I wouldn't expect it to beat a $2k high end gaming machine for gaming performance but getting a cheap used workstation PC and slapping a graphics card in it is definitely something I would recommend for budget to mid-range gamers. This machine specifically I wouldn't recommend for gaming though, it'd be a better home server (e.g. for RSPS or a large Minecraft server) or budget workstation.

[Egg-Roll]

45 minutes ago, pangaea said:

So this seems like it would be a pretty kickass home server. I suppose you could always drop in whatever videocard you want and make it a gaming PC but it really sounds like overkill just for gaming. I thought this was a pretty neat find, what are your thoughts on it?

For gaming the games wouldn't know what to do with the extra cores, let alone the second cpu.

 

For gaming/home servers it will work since you could VM the cores to different servers.

[Zando_]

48 minutes ago, RollTime said:

The price makes me suspicious. I'd be careful.

It's only $500 because of the SSDs and probs the GPU, X58 CPUs are cheap, X5650s are probably under $20 each since they're even lower than an X5675, and I got one of those with a near top tier ASUS mobo for $120. DDR3 RAM, especially ECC Server RAM is dirt cheap because there's just tons of it. So the price doesn't really seem suspicious at all, in fact I'd say it's a little high. 

[Zando_]

Just now, Egg-Roll said:

For gaming the games wouldn't know what to do with the extra cores, let alone the second cpu.

 

For gaming/home servers it will work since you could VM the cores to different servers.

For gaming it should work fine, @WhisperingKnickers and a few other dudes here have dual CPU X58 rigs and they work just fine. And lots of games find uses for the 8c/16t of my R7 2700X (Especially Destiny 2, it spreads stuff out over all the cores quite well), so 12c/24t would be a bit much, but still usable and awesome for any multitasking, especially since you can get obscene amounts of DDR3 ECC RAM for not much money. For a home server it'd defo be killer, I'm going to eventually get my single CPU X58 rig up and running as one. 

[pangaea]

5 minutes ago, Egg-Roll said:

For gaming the games wouldn't know what to do with the extra cores, let alone the second cpu.

 

For gaming/home servers it will work since you could VM the cores to different servers.

I really wouldn't recommend this just for gaming. Not that it wouldn't work but you could buy a much cheaper used workstation PC, slap a GPU in it, and have a decent gaming experience.

[EPENEX]

I wouldn't pay that much for it.

[Spotty]

58 minutes ago, pangaea said:

A lot of hobbyists do buy old workstation/server hardware for budget gaming PCs and home servers. The spec to price ratio can't be beat with regular consumer hardware.

Yeah, true. But do you have any need for such a system?

Once you price out the parts, the $500 price figure seems fairly reasonable.

 

$50 for CPUs ($25 each)
$200 for 12x 4GB (48GB) ECC DDR3 RAM (being a bit generous, from what I see on eBay you can get it for around $150 if you buy from China)
$100 for motherboard (Dual socket 1366 boards still fetch a decent price, but it does depend on the exact model which we don't know)
$50 for the probably heavily used 3x 120GB SSDs (Brand new 120GB SSDs start out at about $25)
$20 for the Firepro v3800 (it's basically just a display output for console)

Case, PSU, etc not worth much.

Sub Total: $420*
Cost of not having to source all the parts yourself, deal with shitty ebay sellers and long shipping times from China: Priceless $80
Total: $500.

(*Rough estimates based on prices from eBay and guesses which are not reliable indicators)

So price isn't too bad for what it is. But it's not a bargain either.

 

31 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

It's only $500 because of the SSDs and probs the GPU

Looked on eBay and there are plenty of Firepro V3800s for $15-$20 "Buy it now". They're not worth much.

 

1 hour ago, pangaea said:

So this seems like it would be a pretty kickass home server. I suppose you could always drop in whatever videocard you want and make it a gaming PC but it really sounds like overkill just for gaming. I thought this was a pretty neat find, what are your thoughts on it?

 

26 minutes ago, pangaea said:

I really wouldn't recommend this just for gaming. Not that it wouldn't work but you could buy a much cheaper used workstation PC, slap a GPU in it, and have a decent gaming experience.

 

Systems like this aren't great for gaming. In games the 12c/24t threads won't be able to be properly utilised and the old CPU architecture, low clock speeds and slower DDR3 memory will all hurt performance.
Instead of buying an old workstation dual core Xeon system for $500 and then buying a GPU to add to it, you would be better off just spending the $500 on a brand new Ryzen 2200G or Ryzen 2600 system and then adding a GPU. You'll get warranty on all the parts and it will probably perform better in games anyway.

 

[Egg-Roll]

36 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

For gaming it should work fine, @WhisperingKnickers and a few other dudes here have dual CPU X58 rigs and they work just fine. And lots of games find uses for the 8c/16t of my R7 2700X (Especially Destiny 2, it spreads stuff out over all the cores quite well), so 12c/24t would be a bit much, but still usable and awesome for any multitasking, especially since you can get obscene amounts of DDR3 ECC RAM for not much money. For a home server it'd defo be killer, I'm going to eventually get my single CPU X58 rig up and running as one. 

I think the only reason to use this as a main gaming computer is for multitasking, and if you're a bigger tab hoarder than me... (tho I doubt that extra 16GB will do much )

That said after 10 months it is cheaper than what I have in France  Which I have paid for now 2 years.... But I don't get unlimited 250mbs up/down at home either... So it's cheaper for me.

 

Maybe times have changed but like multi GPU games couldn't handle multi CPUs well(which prevented me on building a dual cpu system about 10 years ago), you gave a example of one game like how someone can give a example of a SLI game. While I'm sure most if not all modern games going forwards will be able to handle 20 cores (since most can use 4-8) and use every single one, if all one is doing is playing CS:GO and alike it's a waste...

 

If OP does get one, I'm curious about its Folding abilities  Tho I would look for a cheaper price. I would say $400-450 with shipping.

[MEC-777]

Bought a Z600 last year with dual X5650's 8GB ram, Radeon HD 3850 and 2x 250GB HDDs for $200. Was worth it at that price. Planning to do a project with it in the next few months. 

 

Don't think that is worth $500 though. Even with so much ram and 3x 120GB SSDs, IMO. 

[pangaea]

22 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Systems like this aren't great for gaming. In games the 12c/24t threads won't be able to be properly utilised and the old CPU architecture, low clock speeds and slower DDR3 memory will all hurt performance.
Instead of buying an old workstation dual core Xeon system for $500 and then buying a GPU to add to it, you would be better off just spending the $500 on a brand new Ryzen 2200G or Ryzen 2600 system and then adding a GPU. You'll get warranty on all the parts and it will probably perform better in games anyway.

 

If you want a budget gaming build, there are plenty of workstation PCs on eBay for less than half the cost of the one this thread was based around with more "normal" looking specs. Get this https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-Workstation-SFF-Desktop-PC-BOOTS-Core-i7-3770-3-40GHz-16GB-RAM-1TB-HD/192685456746?hash=item2cdcf2bd6a:g:8k8AAOSw9yJbmCMn:rk:6:pf:0 and stick a gaming GPU, maybe an SSD as well into it. Easily a $350 gaming PC.

[Canada EH]

This pc aint worth it for anything other then something that requires and needs many many many many cores.