$175 for a Dell Precision 490?

Ok, so I found a guy on Craigslist selling an old Dell Precision 490 with dual x5355 quad core Xeons, 8 gigs of RAM, 1gb pcie graphics card (not sure what kind), and a 250gb hard drive.
$175 USD. Is the price right?

Those are going to be 65nm Xeons. You can get a pair of them for less than $20 shipped. The motherboard is gonna be worth like, $30, tops. the case is worthless. ECC DDR2 is also basically worth nothing unless it's 4GB FBDIMMs. The 250GB drive may be on its last legs depending on how much it's been used. The power supply is probably so old that it's also worthless.

Depending on what graphics card it has (probably some dual-monitor solution but who knows, you might get a nice surprise - ask the dude), I would pay no more than $80 for the machine. and that's if it happens to have a reasonable graphics card (which I doubt). if it's some GT 610 or something like that I'd offer $60 tops, if you really want it. If it comes with windows, you could bump the price up to $80, but it'll be an OEM version of windows that you can't move to another machine.

People tend to grossly overvalue their machines. We're talking about a computer that is on the order of 10 years old. It's not worth much even to Core 2 Xeon fanboys like me. It'd make a good facebook machine for your grandma that would also double as a space heater - bear in mind the CPUs are 120W each.

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Good to know. Thanks!

Because I have owned one with those 490's with those exact CPUs I think I can talk from experience

Multithreaded performance will be around the level of an 8350, a little under but not by much (10 to15% less). Can't remember what the single thread was because I didn't really care (I used it for 3D rendering)

I was so naive then, I thought everything would magically become more multithreaded, yet here we are with the quad core still king for most things as the extra cores often went to waste

Depends what you want it for really, it would be crap for games but decent for content creation software that uses the cores properly.

If you want an entry level machine for 3D rendering (cpu) then it's okay for the price