Workstation New Build or Used?.

flashyphotos · 22 Apr 2016 at 15:45

I need a new workstation..

Mainly Photo Editing and Video Editing / Recoding.. A little bit of mild gaming

Was looking at building a 5680x X99 system Budgeted around £2k for a decent system

But then came across this

HP Z820 Workstation. (2 years old 1 year warranty left)
CPUs : 2x Xeon E5-2690 8 Core 2.9-3.8Ghz)
RAM : 64Gb DDR3 ECC
DRIVE : 512GB SSD
OS : Windows 7 (option to upgrade to 10)
VIDEO : GTX970

I know the HP Z Series and they are lovely machines.

Looking at the Xeon E5-2690 CPUs each one has nearly the same grunt as a 5680x

Plus I get more memory and a decent graphics card

All in with delivery it comes in at £1600 so about £400 less than budgeted for a good self build system

Just felt this time was the time to move to X99 as the HP is last generation tech, but the spec and price (and still a years on site warranty) is so tempting

What do you think.. New or used?.

ExRayTed · 23 Apr 2016 at 11:18

If the programs you use will make use of all that CPU horsepower then used.

joeyjojo · 23 Apr 2016 at 12:10

Photo won't be much different but that machine for video would be hard to beat at that price.

Sounds like v1 of the E5-2690, which is Sandy Bridge EP, so a little long in the tooth and a pair of them will kick out some heat, but again for the price they're very strong.

flashyphotos · 23 Apr 2016 at 16:33

joeyjojo said:
Photo won't be much different but that machine for video would be hard to beat at that price.

Sounds like v1 of the E5-2690, which is Sandy Bridge EP, so a little long in the tooth and a pair of them will kick out some heat, but again for the price they're very strong.

Yes it's a pair of V1s so 8 core each total 16 core 32 thread, for video they should easily meet and beat the 5680x system

It still has 1 year HP on site warranty left so roughly the same warranty as buying a new system or parts.

The SSD fitted is a Kingston Raptor PCIe so should be up performance wise with a SSD on an X99 board.

Looking at the price of parts I doubt I could build anything similar to it for the price. So will probably go with the used system

Worst comes to worst and I hate it I should be able to sell it and get my money back

flashyphotos · 28 Apr 2016 at 08:11

Well went totally left field in the end..

Had a look at the Z820 but it was scruffy and had a couple of noisy fans, just felt it may not a decent long term solution.

So in the end was going to build a X99 system, but out of nowhere came across a Dell Alienware Area 51 R2

Just over my £2k budget but mega spec
i7 5930k.
3x GTX 980s
32Gb 2133 Hyper X DDR4
1Tb SSD

All boxed and as new with onsite warranty till May 2018

so went with that. More a gaming Rig than workstation but if its overkill can always pull out a couple of GTX980s and sell on.