I’m considering buying an hp x800 with dual xeon X5675 and 24gb ecc ram, I’m just wondering if it is too outdated for my interests (3d modeling/rendering/animation, 2d art/animation, game-development, VMs, possibly networking, gaming(obviously after getting a better gpu)).
Has software moved to preferring faster and less cores. Should i just get a slightly newer i7 workstation and a 1050ti, or is it reasonable for me to use dual xeons?
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What’s the price vs your budget?
Definitely not less cores, but software will almost always perform better with a faster CPU.
If you’re open to new, it sounds like you’d do well with Ryzen. Not to be the guy who only suggests Ryzen, but if it’s in your budget, I think you’ll be happy with it.
price is what you should be considering. and do you plan on adding more ram?
also look into gpu support — don’t assume you can just plug any gpu into an older server board.
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Yes. It’s way way way too old for that. Not even PCIe 3.0. 24GB RAM is a joke. And power consumption is going to suck.
The old ‘enterprise hardware’ meme is tired, and the window on when that was effective is over.
Put together a cheap Ryzen 8 core… or if you are really cheap, get a lower core count and upgrade it when you can.
Maybe you can find something really cheap in the Haswell/Devils canyon era on craigslist.
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agreed.
i have a old poweredge that i looked into upgrading to two 4 core xeons . then i compared the 4 core xeon to a g4400 pentium. the pentium outperforms the xeon in every way ,except price. put both xeons together and they barely edge the pentium out. a core i3 7100 kicks the dual 4 core xeons right down the road, is far more power efficient and modern. if i need 16 cores then ill buy the ryzen.
Thanks for the advice everyone, will consider saving up for a ryzen 7 (may take a few months though).
You can go for it, but there are several catches:
the HP Z800 can’t do high capacity HDDs
The Cpus aren’t that fast, a double x5650 setup will be roughly the same speed as a ryzen 7 1700 provided that you are running a 3D rendering job or similar, in games it will be slower. All while consuming roughly 3 times as much power and making much more noise to the point that it is annoying.
There are limits on what kind of cards you can put in as the PSU does not have (as far as I remember) 8 pin gpu power connectors, only 2 6 pin connectors.
The case weighs a ton.
There are some reasons to go for the Z800, like if you want to have 96gb of ram on the budget as you can get that for ~300 bucks where as getting the same quantity of DDR4 would cost you probably 3x as much if its even possible to fit that much on the board you would be using.
The whole thing comes down to both your budget and your needs, I personally got a z800 system and loaded it up with 96gb of ram all of it coming to a price of 350€ out of which 300 was memory, so for that price it was a good purchase but I wouldn’t pay more than 150 for a z800 base system with 24gb of ram.
TL;DR for VMs and labbing, z800 is fine. For a 24/7 living room machine, not so much. if you can get it for less than 100 American pesos, go for it.
For what your doing, its not a bad box. The X5675 is not a “fast” cpu by any means, but two of them isn’t too bad. The other thing that is nice is that because it is a DDR3 platform, you can get really, really cheap ram on Ebay. My brother works with Mathmatica a LOT, and he needed a lot of ram, and buying Lga 1366 stuff meant that he could get 96GB of ram at the time for ~$200. If your playing with VMs, 3D/2D modeling/Design, or other multi-core and RAM intensive tasks, it will not be a bad machine for the job.
Though, a Ryzen 8 core will definitely game better, will perform as good if not better in 3D/2D modeling, and will be more “Future proof” in terms of platform and single core performance. The only thing is the ram cost, which is where you could save big going Lga 1366. But, don’t get me wrong, Lga 1366 is still very much an old platform that lacks support for new features that Ryzen will support, but its definitely not as bad of an option as some would make it out to be.
If you can get a good deal on the x800 and can find ram cheap, I would consider it. Otherwise, R7 1700.