Can anyone think of (a) reason(s) why this HPZ420 with a Xeon E5-1650 v2 would not make a reasonable "general purpose" PC? I've been planning to get a refurb Win7 machine for a while, but this is making me wonder if I shouldn't just get over it, give in to the dark side, and learn to live with Win10...
I haven't even played solitaire in a few years<lol>) so gaming is a total non-issue, and in general, I don't need blazing single-core performance. On the other hand, multiple cores/threads are something I would make good use of. For starters I definitely want to start playing around with 3D rendering again (using Blender and Luxrender mostly). Faster is always better, and a couple of benchmarks suggest that a recent Core i7 might well beat this out, but from what I've seen, I don't think I can get even a refurb with a significantly better CPU (let alone one with any brand of 240GB SSD) for anything near this price?
Ignoring the NVS290 GPU this particular configuration ships with, the only potential downsides I'm really seeing are that it needs ECC RAM and it has only USB2 ports. A brief glance at prices for DDR3 ECC RAM suggests that's not the end of the world, and I can probably live with the 8GB it ships with for a while, too. And the number of free PCIE slots is more than adequate to use an add-on card for USB3 ports, while leaving room for further expansion. Even the PSU seems decent, and certainly better than the average consumer pre-built, at 600W. The 240GB SSD, especially having no idea what brand it is, I see as a mixed bag, but then even an unidentified 1TB mechanical HD might be iffy, and I can't get the other specs with that anyway...
I'm not sure how big a "sale" this is - Newegg's Daily Deals haven't generally been massively discounted for a while now - but compared to refurbs with much lesser specs going for $200 plus/minus, $380 with free shipping seems pretty good.
I haven't even played solitaire in a few years<lol>) so gaming is a total non-issue, and in general, I don't need blazing single-core performance. On the other hand, multiple cores/threads are something I would make good use of. For starters I definitely want to start playing around with 3D rendering again (using Blender and Luxrender mostly). Faster is always better, and a couple of benchmarks suggest that a recent Core i7 might well beat this out, but from what I've seen, I don't think I can get even a refurb with a significantly better CPU (let alone one with any brand of 240GB SSD) for anything near this price?
Ignoring the NVS290 GPU this particular configuration ships with, the only potential downsides I'm really seeing are that it needs ECC RAM and it has only USB2 ports. A brief glance at prices for DDR3 ECC RAM suggests that's not the end of the world, and I can probably live with the 8GB it ships with for a while, too. And the number of free PCIE slots is more than adequate to use an add-on card for USB3 ports, while leaving room for further expansion. Even the PSU seems decent, and certainly better than the average consumer pre-built, at 600W. The 240GB SSD, especially having no idea what brand it is, I see as a mixed bag, but then even an unidentified 1TB mechanical HD might be iffy, and I can't get the other specs with that anyway...
I'm not sure how big a "sale" this is - Newegg's Daily Deals haven't generally been massively discounted for a while now - but compared to refurbs with much lesser specs going for $200 plus/minus, $380 with free shipping seems pretty good.