I've seen these older HP Z440 business workstations on YouTube, I gotta
say, they look pretty amazing.

There's one on Amazon with 32 GB RAM, a 2TB HD, and an Inten Xeon
E5-1630v3 CPU. It's got sa bunch of USB 3 ports on the front and back,
and it'll take up to a E5-2699 CPU with 36 threads. It's under $200.

A -2697 CPU with 14 cores and 26 threads is under $40.

The motherboard has 2 PCI-e x16 slots, 1 x8 and 1 x4, and a plain ol'
PCI slot.

The only downside is ECC RAM. I'd max out the RAM I need now rather than
try to buy it later when it gets rarer. I ran into problems in the past
waiting too long to upgrade memory in a similar system.

The power consumption might be an issue compared to a newer system, but
this looks like nothing to sneeze at. "Workstation" systems are nicely
built, too - if this is anything like the Dell T series Workstation
line, it's built like a tank.


 
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