The INCREDIBLE Used Z230 - Why This Old Workstation Is STILL a Great Buy. 

Yall want more potato hunter? I can have started honing the skill of hunting thy potato.

In my area we have been seeing alot of the HP Prodesk 400 G3 MT's with the 6th gen intels going for $50 to $60 USD.I picked up one recently with the I3 6100 and 8 gigs of ddr 4 for $40 USD. I threw in an SSD and an RX550 for my Step Daughter to use for playing the Sims.

8:15 "*You still get really good gpu on this fps...*" I agree, it's a beautiful mistake ;)

Love this channel, so humble you talk about things people can actually afford. Can't stand RU-vidrs building 10 000 dollar builds as if viewers can afford such builds. Your channel actually helps viewers not just showing off ridiculous builds.

Worked for a vendor of these in the past with several different clients, including medical and construction. We would drop in a Quartto card for use with things like CAD or reading Xrays. Great machines and built like a tank. Like what you did with it. Great vid.

Haswell is an amazing platform. Bought my 4770K in my main system brand new years ago. Overclocking only gives a marginal improvement, but these chips are so strong as is. Runs easy with a 1070 and sits about 60 FPS at 3440x1440 - save for the most demanding titles. I've been able to find a few of these i7's and Xeons for under $50 and get them in killer budget systems with RX580s for under $175/ea all in - sent most of them to family and friends. Heavily debating on an upgrade with 4th gen Ryzen coming soon, but 7+ years on the same chip in 4 different GPU configurations is a testament to how great this platform is.

Thanks for keeping on posting your content during this difficult times appreciate your hard work !! Stay safe!!!

I once said "I don't want to get any socks on my leaves." My family still reminds me. Your gaff is just as beautiful.

Thanks! I have Z420 with E5-1650 (600w PSU 2x6 pin) and Z400 with X5670 (475w with 1x 6 pin) ! Always wondered if the PSU in Z200s were good enough. I use molex to 6-pin and then 2x6 pin to 1x8 pin adapters to power the GDPU... Love it!! XEON INSIDE!

you're the ultimate tech recycle king! love everything you do, keep it up! it will definitely help people not to throw away computers.

Currently working on maxing out an HP Compaq Elite 8100 SFF, love pushing these little prebuilts to their absolute limits!

I recently picked up a SFF Optiplex for a family member and was tickled when I found out about the in-built speaker. Real 90's blast from the past. Also solved a problem because they had no speakers ready.

I rewatched this video and finally got myself motivated to working on my HPZ 230 and made some upgrades. It now has the HP Turbo PCIE card with a hard to find Samsung SM 951 AHCI M.2 and an I7-4790 that I took out of an Elite 800 G1 SFF. 32GB of ram and taking the OE 400W PSU into consideration instead of hassling with a new ATX PSU, I went with a reasonably priced lower powered EVGA GTX 1060 and purchased some games that I totally suck at playing at the moment lol. Now I'm on to the HPZ 620 with an older GTX 770 card which is a power hog that requires 2 power cables but the 620"s 800W PSU should handle it. It was fun and I learned alot from this video, thanks.

I have a small form-factor one of these and it's great! Thanks for sharing info about it.

GreenPCGamers have a great channel with info and how to's when turning common old workstations into gaming PCs. Great info on upgrades too. I like finding good deals on the hp z400 with the w3680 6 core at 3.30Ghz. It's pretty cheap and common

I am ready for some Tech Yes Earlysquad.

I just bought this machine with core i5 4th gen with 16 gb ddr3 for editing videos for my RU-vid channel. Thank you for this video

Another great vid and welcome distraction, you Guys are a godsend in the current climate, thanks form the U of K!

I've worked on workstations for years and I can honestly say the difference between the quality of a PC at the same time is Chalk and Cheese. They always have the best processors, the best (certified) graphics cards, proper ECC memory, Completely over engineered cooling and the very fastest hard drives available. They are built to deliver 100% performance for 100% of the time and do it for years. The purpose of a workstation is to do the heavy lifting of computing tasks like cad and video editing and even Finite element analysis. Really brutal workloads where the CPU and memory and disk will be maxed out for sometimes days at a time. And do that in the fastest time possible in the current technology. Money no object. They are built to take that load. As games machines they are typically exceptional even 10 years after release with a GPU swap out and passable without. The Nvidia Quadro cars are as capable as the similar gaming cards of the same era but they tend to have more conservative drivers and also the ram is configured differently. They have a ton of space for complex models. Tons and Tons but less for textures so they can be a bit stuttery in games with high textures. Best thing to do is to swap out the graphics card and put a new one in. You're gonna have to try hard to bottleneck 2 Xeons with 8 cores each in an XW8400. they run at 3.4ghz which is respectable. And it's a ten year old computer. Some games have compatibility issues which is why after 10 years of loyal service I'm retiring my son's HP XW8400 Dual Xeon 3.4ghz with 32mb of ECC ram in favour of an I7 3770K with 16mb. I'm hoping to reuse the XW8400 case. Not sure if it will be compatible but it's a project. HP workstations are the absolute Bomb. I originally worked with old HP-UX machines and they were awesome too... Just the best quality and clearly made by engineers with no care for the bottom line only reliability. Props to them. Luv and Peace.

This is why I love this channel content like this not content with the most expensive stuff day in day out there hasn't been a video I haven't liked 100% 5he best channel out there

In regards to your first question, yes that is exactly what I have on my Fractal Design Define R6, blue LED in all.

I like using Dell Precisions for budget gaming rigs. You can usually get them pretty cheap on the used market if you know where to look. I got two for $100 in a municipal asset liquidation auction. All I had to add was Ram, Storage, and a GPU. Since they have Xeons, I was able to get a 64GB kit of ECC DDR3 for like $80 which brought both machines up to 32GB. Storage was just some SSDs I had on-hand. The GPU is a RX-570 that I got for $50, only thing I had to do was get a 2x6 to 8-Pin adapter.

Watching this on my z230! Awesome computer, gold star ebay sell was nice enough to sell me a 16gb ram, i5-4570 for $150 free shipping. 75$ dollars later the used rx 570 is running great in it! :)

A few weeks ago I got an HP Z420 with a Xeon E5 1603, 16GB of ram (4x4gb), and a FirePro V3900 on eBay for $52 US including shipping. Not a bad deal if I do say so myself. I stuck a 240gb Adata ssd ($25 amazon), a 1tb and a 2tb hdd (found at thrift store $10 each) , and an R9 270 (pulled from an old rig from thrift store $20) all in it. Very happy the performance I got for the price but plan to upgrade the cpu soon and further upgrade the gpu in the future.

These HP Z series workstations are tremendous value for money. I picked up 10 of them for $200 about a month ago. A couple of them were scrappers but the rest are all solid systems with good power supplies that are ready for a graphics card and ready to sell on for a good price.

Thanks hope you're staying safe see you on the flip side.

I should grab one of those! Will be interesting to compare it to my Z400 and Dell T3500

I got a HP z230 free from a convience store, and it was used for security cameras footage storing. After 2 months I have done alot of upgrades, like bought a Gtx 1070 ti for it. It is a gaming beast

Wish theyre available here. Need these kinds of OEM stuff.

I actually have one of these with the 4770 that old work was gonna donate. Paired it with an RX580 and a new power supply, it worked well for a year but I just moved on to a used Ryzen 3600 system, still with the RX580, and finding the cpu was really bottlenecking that card in a lot of ways. There were some other quality of life issues with the z230, namely there are only two USB 3 ports on the backside and the unit lacks Bluetooth. That said I’ll be keeping mine to build into a NAS and it is a great value option to start with, assuming one can get a graphics card at a decent price as well.

I bought 3 months ago an HP Elite 7500 microtower Z75 formosa motherboard, (was £40) and paired it with an i5 3570k (£25) and managed to even overclock the cpu without any a hassle.The bios was indeed a little short compared to other manufracturers, but it had all the necessary options.

"Beautiful mistake" that's what my parents called me

Definitely good value here. See quite a bit of these on the used market for very cheap. Brian, you should look into the e5 1660v3, which is the Xeon variant of the i7-5960X(8c/16t). They're selling for $150 used on ebay and overclock very well.

I have 3 different Dell Precision workstations now. My main rig being a T5610 with dual Xeon E5-2650 V2s and 128 GB of ECC RAM with a Zotac 1070 Amp Extreme.

Nice , informative videos. HP Z series are amazing. And yes, as you mentioned the BIOS is locked very well. I really wish to find some unlocked BIOS for the Z230 or even Z400 and Z440. Unlocked CPUs are available for each LGA sockets in these Z workstations. However, OC is not that easy. I could OC the Z440 but it is too complicated. Another option maybe the UEFI BIOS editing/hacking.

Got lucky on some parts and put together a dell t3500 Xeon x5650 and a Rx570 8gb from another buyer for a total of $206 working great so far

When I upgraded from my 775 rig, I got a T3610 for $200. It has a 675w PSU, Ivy Bridge E5 1650v2 6 core CPU and 32 GB if ram. It's been a great PC for me the past year and a half.

I picked up a HP z230 for $170. I cant believe how well it works. It has a zeon processor, 16 gb of ram, a 500 gb sata drive, a 256 SSD and quadro graphics card. I plan to add a 2tb WD blue hard drive which I bought for $20. When graphic cards come down I will upgrade that. I have been watching your videos and that has helped me find good deals. The best deals are the deals you find for free.

Stay safe out there Bryan!

I have been looking for a good Z series in my area since February at a nice price. If I had found one at about $200 (USD) I would have purchased it the same day. One of these would be my main PC for the next 10 years.

Very nice video 😀 HP Z230 with i7 4790, RAM 4x8GB 1600Mhz, nVidia Quadro K5000 here 😉 ... she still runs 😝

5:08 is it possible to get an internal speaker like that to work with Ryzen B450 boards? Or I guess any modern motherboard?

Question im changing to aussie bb after major hassles with telstra i need to purchase a new router. Is there one you would recommend for my gaming & just general internet stuff as well? Thanks

Hey. Do you recommend updating the bios for the pre spectre update or setting on an old version?

z230, z420, and z440 are the most bang for the buck right now. Dell t5810, socket 2011-3 like the z440, can occasionally be found dirt cheap too.

If I didn't give a fig about your channel, that gaffe would have won me over! :D fortunately, I am already a big fan. Greetings from Florida, USA!

I have a z230 with an i7 at work for emails, printing construction drawings. Always thought it would be better suited at home with a fat graphic card and some steam games!

What do you do with all of the spare boxers, power splitters, screws, etc that you have leftover with flipping hardware?

Speaking of nice hps, im still running mine from 2010! Planning on upgrading cpu soon though, this athon just aint cutting it anymore.

Thanks for posting the video I picked up a z240 with the i7 6700 and I just installed 32 GB of ram :D. I have a question for you, do you think I would have to get a new power supply if I were to get the nvidia 1660 ti/super gpu? any help or pointing me in the right direction would help out a lot. Have a good one!

This was is my secondary PC, E3-1270v3 32gb of eec r5500XT dual boot Mac OS and windows 10

I had the Z220 with 450 sfx power supply w/ power adapter, gtx 1060 6gb/ rx 580 4gb single fan and xeon e3-1230v2 with no issues.

Been running a Z220 on an i7 3770 with a 1650 for years. Great price / performance and solid as a rock. I swear by these z-series workstations. Had the Z210 with a 2600 in it for years and sold that privately for what I paid for it - never had a single issue with it. Just ordered a Z240 and can't wait to put it through its paces. Xeon with 32GB this time.

love the hp z's. son has a z200 and i upgraded my z400 to z600 dual xeons..

Would this computer accommodate 2 gpus? I can’t tell if it’s a second pcie under the one that is installed

Hello Brian, I recently thought of buying a Lenovo M83 mini tower and pair it with two PSU-s and a sapphire R9 390 will the card get recognized by the pc ?

Although these OEM workstations do not lend themselves to RGB bling very well, you might want to consider "sporterizing" them with some carbon vinyl (with self-adhesive) designed for car exteriors. I used some glossy black 3D carbon pattern on the exterior side panel and it really made the box look cool. Plenty of choice on eBay for this decor.Just a thought.

I have one of these can you check if you are having current/edp throttling on the processor under load?

Hi, can you please explain liquid metal on copper. i am confused. how can i tell if i am 100% coper or mixed? and what exactly happens if its naked copper? and how often do you need to re-apply liquid metal? i want to apply liquid metal. is the razer blade 2019 heatsink 100% naked copper?

Bryan that power supply tester light were only Blue on hear when you put it on first !!!!

SUGGESTION: You should do a paint job on them. It'd be nice to see a painted OEM system. Makes it look more like a gaming PC

quick question... can i transfer this mobo to another case and connect the front io? ( I only care about the power button ).

Need your advice on which gpu will work better for my cpu(i7 7700 non k), currently looking at the rtx 2060 super and 5700xt. Will game on 1080 and might stream as well. I know rtx is geared to be better for streaming due to the new nvenc chip but will any of these 2 cards be bottleneckef by my cpu? Thanks and more power!

I just picked up a HP ProDesk 400 G1 mid-tower with an i5-4590, 4GB RAM, and 250GB HDD off eBay for only $68 USD (including tax & shipping). Spent $35-40 USD on a used 650w Seasonic PSU, $90 for a used Biostar RX580 4GB, $25 for a 240GB SSD, and put in 16GB of DDR3 and a 1TB hard drive pulled from my previous gaming rig. This little tower is quiet, yet runs fast. It even a mono speaker like the Z230! Only complaints I have are that it has no USB 3.0 ports in the back (only 2 in the front), and the GPU blocked 2 of the SATA ports, so I had to unplug the DVD drive.

hello can you tell me if i can use the hp workstation z210 with the oem psu 400watts. with the gtx 1060 EVGA SSC 6 GB ?

Hi brother. O have the same workstation with nvidia quadro k2000. Its shuting down randomly... in between sudenly show that shuting down... some times restarts also. I checked all the parts exclude the power supply. Its seems working good. But i dont know what to do. An u help?

What adapter are you using to power the gpu as the original psu has only one 6 pin connector and the gpu requires 8 pin.

Tech yes city I am not able to get my internal speakers to work on z230 any possible reason its not working?

Thank bro , i had one of PC the game working excellent

Can I change the air cooler to a water cooler and are the places for installing the cooler is standard

What kind of adapter did you have to use to connect the graphic card to the PSU in this case?

This was my first pc, had a i7 4770, 8gb of ram and a gtx 770, it has a 1060 now but I use it as a streaming pc and a gaming rig for when my friends come over(not atm lol).

do i have to install bios and drivers if i buy this without the previous hdd?

Hay I have optiplex 7010 and i7 3770 but all the USB 3.0 ports are not working. Only Power output. Can you please tell me what to do. (Windows 10)

Hi, thanks for this vidéo. I use HP 8200 i3-2100 with 8 gb RAM 128 SSD will I see a big difference. I have problem on multi-tasking with web browser and Office ...

How much of it is proprietary? Can you swap the case power supply ext without trouble

The z line of hp is my favorite used pc. I have personally had like three and sold probbaly 10 of them. I had a z800 as a dual x5650 render server and a z400 as a file server and then evually had to sell the z800 because its power supply died so sad. The z400 are great when you buy a power supply adapter and can put any psu in it plus the mobo replacment is like 40 bucks and supports those 6 core xeons

Could you mount a noctua, or even a snowman cooler on this motherboard? Does HP use the same hole dimensions for all non Intel standard cpu cooler mounts?

I'm about to upgrade my pc from I5 4590 and I'm planning to buy some e3 v3 xeon but I don't know which one I should buy. I'm thinking about 1241, 1246 and 1270, for me it looks the same and all of them cost almost the same. Could you help me to choose the best one?

I just picked up one of these for 280 bucks. Will upgrade the psu and graphics card and have a next gen system for 5 years for under a 1000

Hello. I bought a Used Z230 Motherboard off EBay. I was wondering if I can boot into Bios with a new ssd card. The front panel power and led, are pins the same as a regular ATX motherboard? Or do I need an adapter of some kind? Can I install Windows 10?

Hardly any troubles using my e-cycled Precision T5500 and it was so cheap I could get a rx5700-xt and 1440p 144hz monitor instead of just a new desktop. Thanks for the great tips!

Can the Z230 with the 400W stock PSU really run the RTX 2060 Super (175W)?

As someone who has worked on and owned a few z230's... They have their quirks. 1. Hard to get these things to boot with more than 16GB of ram. 2. They are picky with what sorts of ram they will run at the full 1600mhz speed. 3. Upgrading the PSU IS possible BUT the original one is a non-standard size so mounting can be difficult and HP uses a proprietary connector for power on the motherboard. (You can buy adapters on Amazon and Ebay). 4. The BIOS updates for Spectre & MD as mentioned take a bite out of the performance. I have found it hard to roll back the bios on many systems. 5. Limited fan headers = you will only be able to throw in 1 more fan unless you plan on putting in a fan controller into one of the 5.25" bays. Aside from that, they are a decent bang for your buck!

in spain z230 sff xeon 1240v3, cuda k620, 8gb ram and 1tb hdd its 50e .. i would like to know if there is any aftermarket cooler that works in this motherboard

what are the gens with the z420 one i would like to know cause i own one please help?

What is the software you use while testing looking to see what my computers average FPS is

How do you actually connect the gpu, because most oem psus dint have 8 os 6 pins

"Really good GPU, on this FPS". I LOVE IT! That should be on a Tech YES City T-Shirt, LOL! TYC MERCH BABY! Get your BANK ON BROTHER, you've earned it.

Where did you get the power supply adapter for the 1070 8 pin?

What kind of memory and how much of it did you put in it? Cheers! Always great content;

I've upgraded this Workstation with a 1660 Super OC. Can I now switch to a 1440P 27" monitor? Will I be able to play games at high settings?

Hey, does anyone know what is the exact cable I could use to power a gtx 970 G1 that use one 8 pin and one 6 pin when I only got a 6 pin for the GPU ?

Hey mate I live in the UK and I found a Z240 with i7-6700 and 1TB nvme for £160. I have an old Gigabyte GTX960 that I want to put inside. It has 2x6pin connector. I have only one 6pin connector from the PSU and I can see only one molex, rest are sata and the molex adaptors that I can find on amazon are dual molex to 6pin. Is there a molex and sata to 6pin adaptor? What should I do? I heard sata (even dual sata) to 6pin is not recommended. Any advice? Thanks!

I bought an old HP Z 440 on eBay Australia for $230. It's running NTLite windows 11. E5 1620 V3, 32 gb ddr4 and a K 2200 GPU. Comes with a 525 watt psu and a 870 Samsung SSD. I only use it for basic video editing, watching RU-vid. It's quite fast for an older PC.

Which adapter did you use for the 8 pin to the graphic card?

Hi Brain could this be put in a new case?If so any chance of you doing it.I.I enjoy your videos.Keep up the good work.Someone has done it with the 240 i see it is a big job to do it.

How can I put an gpu inside, the psu does not have a 6pin power cable for gpu

Can i upgrade the bios on my z210 to be able to use newer i5 i7 Like the z220 ?

Got lots of them at work (Z200 to Z230) And to my knowledge NONE of them had issue with reliability ! Great base components and unkillable !