Hey, every one. I decided to upgrade my Home Office Work Station / Computer Lab for 2020. It was definitely time for an upgrade for productivity and down right sanity running some of these newer O.S.’s as bloated as they are. The use cases would be as a DAW(Digital Audio Work Station),DVW(Digital Video Work Station), crypto trading box., along with image editing, etc..
I decided to go with an HP z800 Work Station box for my upgrade path. I know this a 9 year old system but I think it can still hang today in 2020 for what I need done. For under $500. This thing is less then half the price of a HP z840 work station and should be perfectly capable for what I need done for now.
BUILD SPECS:
HP z800
6-Core 3.33GHz Intel Xeon “Westmere” X5680 [6-cores / 12-threads] x2
48 GB DDR 3 Ram
1TB mech HD
Old ass AMD Firepro
These things are built like a tank and mine still had all the shrouding inside. I have a few older 120gb SSD’s I have to dig up that I will most likely use for the boot drive and use the 1 TB mechanical drive for storage. For now though I just installed Windows 10 and Ubuntu Studio in a dual boot configuration with GRUB on the mechanical HD to get this thing up and running.
Want to add a more modern GPU but I found a cheap 6gb one for now.
Really liking it so far. Can have like 150 tabs open in mozilla with Ubuntu Studio lol I think with a modern video card and GPU accelerator. Along with a decent ssd and nvme card. this things still a viable computer workhorse for the price in 2020. I'll report back when I know more.
Original posting is below with more detailed build list