[Refurbished Dual XEON HPZ600] Linux Dual Boot

Feynman81

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May 12, 2017
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Hi all,
I'm in need of a powerful workstation.

I will use it mainly for number crunching (Computational fluid dynamics and genetic algorithms) and CAD, it will be my main system as well. I will run mainly Ubuntu as my OS but I need Windows for CAD so I was thinking about dual booting.

Since I'm on a low budget (<700/800 Euros) I was thinking about buying a refurbished HP workstation, I've been scanning ebay for quite a while now, there are a lot of HPZ600 Dual XEON out there but what really got me interested is this:

- DUAL CPU XEON X5670 (2,93 GHz - 3.33 MAX)
- 24 GB ECC DD3 RAM
- 1 HDD 1 TB SATA 3.5"
- AMD FirePro V7900 2 GB VRAM
- WIN 10 PRO pre installed.

All of this for less then 600 Euros, it come with a 1 year warranty for everything but the graphic card which is given a 3 years warranty from AMD (so it seems the GPU is brand new).

This seems to me a pretty sweet deal, Am I missing something?

The Z series has a solid reputation and this workstation seems to have pretty solid spec, the CPU is still relevant today (and there are 2 of them), enough RAM and a more then decent new professional graphic card.

What do you think?
 
There are old systems and then there are old systems. There's an immense change in single core performance from the Nehalem / Westmere generation to the E3/E5 Sandy Bridge generation. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1307&cmp[]=1204 this is 20% single thread improvement clock-for-clock which is roughly the same jump in IPC as from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake(!) and they managed to raise the clock speed as well. All in all, unless all my work was heavily multithreaded I'd rather get an E3/E5.

HP Z620, Z820 for example.
 
. All in all, unless all my work was heavily multithreaded I'd rather get an E3/E5.

I agree with your statement in the newer generation being better at single core performance. It really depends on the software and usage.
You can get some good deals out there if you search around and buy the system best for your application.
It may also be a good idea to get that system and replace the Xeon "X" cpus with the "L" variant for lower power usage if multi-threading is the primary target.
 
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