The ULTIMATE Budget Workstation. 

Join the discord!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! discord.gg/2Wj8WanUzn

now you have ascended to the enterprise hardware realm and can look look down at all the plebeians with their consumer hardware

Sorry to hear about your accident. Hope you get better soon.

the thing about old workstations is, that they were once worth thousands and thousands for a reason! a 10 year old workstation can go further than most people realize

Dude i feel you. The pain i receive daily tryng to shoot videos is incomprehensible to my old self. I was a passenger in a car accident in 2018. Almost died, but was blessed to walk away with broken ribs, herniated discs and vertebrae knocked out of alignment thru my back n neck. I had to medically retire out the military n adjust to a new life. Im glad you were able to walk away and have a solid suport base. Just found you, but love the video and your perseverance. Keep going

You should replace the GPU with an ARC A750. Hear me out. QuickSync beats the crap out of CUDA on encoding, and you can encode in VP9 directly so you save time on the RU-vid conversions. Try it in a video with this nice encoding CPU setup and you’ll see what I mean. I replaced my Quadro RTX A4000 with an ARC A750 and I get 40+ 4K HEVC h265 to 1080p h264 transcodes simultaneously now in Plex with zero buffering. However I also have 4x 4TB PCIE 3.0 NVME SSDs (bifurcation, which your motherboard supports) in RAID 5, so 12TB total as my storage, and transcode drive is a 128 GB RAM Drive that dumps to disk before a reboot. This RAM Drive dump happens lightning fast too. I might increase the RAM Drive to 192 GB because I have 256 GB DDR 3 ECC total, and I can never seem to go over 50 GB of RAM usage with 200 chrome tabs open and other apps.

I too got a T7820 ($200) and after upgrades it's running dual 6126 for 24c/48t and 12x32 (384GB) RAM. It's a very capable platform for workstation and home server duties!

I too was hit as a pedestrian, the driver was drunk. Hope you have a speedy recovery. Great video and amazing build for the cost, liked and Subbed. 😇

I love this approach- "We have the 1950X at home." Your focus on older hardware reminds me of Iceberg Tech. Subbed!

Awesome idea! Thanks for the tips and links.

Funny that you bring Miyconst up. I had a little talk with him about a nas server solution not long ago. I think he is very knowledgeable in this field

I got my 5810 from the same place a couple years ago. Not a powerhouse but I was super happy with the purchase - it has been my "living room"/media PC ever since... and I play pretty modern games on it all the time. 1650 v4. I also do some music production and it handles a crapton of channels and effects quite well, especially after a small ram upgrade.

Wake up babe new chairleg video dropped

I LOVE WORKSTATIONS

Awesome video. Thank you for sharing.

lol he said “All you weirdos that work on Blender”

Workstations are definitely the way to go. Got a Lenovo C30 during covid. 2 x e5-2680 v2 and 128GB of ecc DDR3. While not so good as that Dell it handles huge multiple image file sets with ease using GIMP.

I use one of these similar workstations at work. I was amazed just how much they can handle.

Old work stations are where it's at! I'm running a T5810 with E5-2667g3 (got a E5-2687Wg4 waiting to go in) 128GB ECC registered ram, RTX-2060 w/16Gb and an M.2 nvme on an adaptor card. It's running Ubuntu LTS. Before this I used a Dell T3500 for years. The parts are old but they're cheap, well built and have great real-world performance. Welcome to the enterprise-grade club.

My first Dell Precision was a T5600, which I got for free from my employer (gifted/fully written off) after it was decommissioned in 2017; plus an extra 825W PSU that had been trashed along with another T5600 chassis. Still have it as a backup unit at our second apartment. I upgraded it to dual E5-2680's (from dual E5-2667) back in 2018. The only investment was a 0.5TB SSD, single use Win10 Pro license, and repurposed RX590.

i am amused - the xeon you bought was an MSRP of 3k each and you got them for 150 or so. buying old tech is so nice...

I got the single cpu thinkcenter cause it had a good 8 pin for a 3060 12gb. Im never going back. Came with a xeon 2135 and 64 gb of ram for $190. This thing just runs beautifully. Congrats on the build, definitely use earlier videos you made to look further into this so thank you.

Now I feel bad for by $5k workstation.

Feel better dude!!

you can get a nvidia telsa p40 with 24gb of ram at least of 200 dollar for vram video editing

Bought a HP Z620 years ago for $200. Upgraded the Xeons to E5-2667V2. It came with 64 MB EEC, two 2T hard drives , and a 6MB video card. For maximum productivity at minimum cost, old workstations are the way to go.

Excellent video, enterprise grade workstations are awesome and cheap on the used market.

Nice! I just recently got a T7910 so a little bit older, but 28 cores, 56 threads + 64GB of DDR4, and a gtx 1080. oh and a 500GB nvme drive with adapter. Its quite a beast I might add. I may eventually drop my RTX 2080 Super in there.

I got a T5820 during covid when everything was unobtanium. Replaced the CPU with a 12core v3 CPU and that workstation did everything I needed until I built myself a new machine. Since then it's been my proxmox server and I'm just getting around to replacing it with an Epyc system. For the ~$400 I put into it it was definitely worth it.

Hello, fellow bad-back haver! Do whatever exercises your doctor/physical therapist gave you, on whatever schedule they gave you, or on some regular schedule if you didn't get a schedule. Also, get a back brace. Also also, if your car doesn't have lumbar support for it's seat, consider getting a lumbar support pillow. I found one at an auto parts store and I wanna buy like ten more because that one took me from not being able to comfortably drive to often feeling better *after* driving than before!

That's an awesome build! The Dell T7820 is surprisingly good, now I want to build one myself!

Last year I bought a barebone Precision 7920 (wider 7820 with a bit better cooling and more expansion slots) for $460, a pair of Xeon Gold 6146s for $230, and 128gb ram to use as a home server. I loaded it up with 8 3.5" HDDs, a few GPUs, and installed Proxmox. I ran Cinebench R23 and got 1084 SC and 27794 MC. I ended up selling it (for a profit at least) cause I really just didn't need it lol. It was a beast thought and I wish I had found a reason to keep it. Cheers

Love that you tried BeamNG on it, really like seeing how the sim performs on high core count systems like yours

Gah, I have a thing for these massive CPUs, and you've just informed me that they're relatively accessible... Stop giving me ideas, I'm already spending too much money!

Glad you're OK man! That car crash was intense.

very cool video whats the power usage?

I would've loved to see how much power it draws at it's maximum potential but regardless, amazing video, nice cinematic shots and great story writing skillz, hope you have a safe recovery

I saw this and ended up getting this same barebones 7820 and OH MY GOD. if they didnt use all proprietary parts i would never build diy pcs again, and personally its gonna take a lot to get me off the used workstation train from now on. awesome video

I took similar route and am in love with my HP Z840 workstation. Nvidia 3090 and it is a great AI monster for little money.

This is waay better than the usual high core xeon builds with poor ipc.

Very cool, love seeing these old workstation rebuilds. Curious what was the wattage it's pulling on average?

Not a bad option for people who have a tight budget.

Love the videos, I’m wondering how you don’t have 100k subs by now

Learning to walk back & forth on a schiller piano : "...what is this s***, magic?!..."

Recover well ❤

I actually bought a dell 7920 rack mount a few weeks ago (hasnt arrived yet) and this video has me even more hyped about the performance I can hopefully get out of it 27k on cinebench? Damn Althlough I onlt got 2 12 core xeons, don't remember their model names

nice shot !!!

Very interesting video. Any idea what the cause was of the screen damage on the monitor that you featured please? Asking because my LG 43UD79 has just about the very same image that appears despite no external damage being apparent. Absolutely gutted to have discovered this damage considering it's been used very little. Not sure whether a Mainboard replacement will remedy this as from what's understood the screen has been physically damaged somehow however as I've said I'm at a loss as to how it was damaged. Thank you. Keep up the great content.

Hope you Are better now After your accident ❤

Awesome video, looking into similar build. Are you running Windows 10 or 11? Not sure if Windows 11 supports Xeons.

What about power and noise, can this thing sit in your living room or is it waking up the neighbors?? I'm thinking about a Poweredge 640 but this may be a possible alternative.

Could you suggest a PSU for this rig ? Amazing video thanks for sharing. Can I install Ubuntu on it by the way ?

Great video. I did see a LTT video the other day where Linus had a rig complete a blender render in literally the blink of an eye. But it was like a 300k machine. I have been thinking of building my daughter an am5 system for this very thing. I suppose you feel this would blow any am5 setup out of the water for video editing yes? I have a couple other questions if you wouldn’t mind. The first cpu does it not have a cpu cooler? Maybe I just missed its install. Did you do the water cooling? Or did it come with cpu coolers? What was your total cost of the build?

Hey if you use zfs + zstd compression you can achieve (# of drives) x (speed of single drive) x (compression ratio [I get between 1.7 - 3.64x compression) Resulting in crazy fast storage, which also happens to have a ram disk cache (ie zfs arc) I'm getting nearly 14GB/s read speeds off a laptop with x2 gen3 m2 ssds...

I asked this question on your Discord as well. Apologies for the repeated wall of text. I like the idea of the 40 core budget monster for video editing and transcoding. That leads me to my question here. Why don't tech tubers ever show things like numbers of simultaneous transcodes with Plex, or Handbrake HEVC veryslow transcodes or AV1 preset 1 or 0 transcodes? Most just say something like "Handbrake transcode speed in XX minutes," but never say their settings. I really want to build this 40 core 80 thread beast, but I need more info and stats.

Yes, I really like my T7820. I got a loaded one without vid and hd for a bit over $500 with dual 6148's.

I typically stay away from that gen xeon for budget workstation and instead go first gen EPYC as the are super easy to OC and Enermax TR4 (gen2) has no problem keeping them cool. My 32core is at 3.8Ghz and u get more expandability and can go 64 core if need be. For storage i use 2 asus hyper m.2 adapters with 8 nvme drives (all 8 in raid zero with immense bandwidth / speed cause i dont store anything permanent there just work and games) and I have 4 8TB HDDs but I use Primocahce to speed them up immensely by using ram plus an extra nvme as cache (apart from the 8 nvme on the asus adapters, the motherboard has 2 nvme slots plus i have extra pcie slots free. This is my baseline config for all my budget EPYC builds.

Amazing, how you managed to extend 1 minute useful info for 15 minutes! 👏

I got myself a home server which is a hp z640 and has dual xeon e5 2680 v4 so I have 28/56 of broadwell not skylake and 128gb of ram. I'm also running Truenas which makes its so all programs are numa aware and will run across all cpu cores. all in spent like less than 300 usd and that thing is beast for anything I throw at it. my average cpu utilization is about 2 percent with a boat load of services running.

I suspected deals like this were out there. Thanks!

Id have to try and Hackintosh that

I've got this setup crunching for World Community Grid on BOINC. Have you figured out a way to unleash the 6138's to their full 3.7Ghz Boost potential on the T7820? I hover around 2.6Ghz with all cores below 80C so there is a lot of lost potential still to be had.

As a reference, while this system can handle 768 GB of RAM across two CPUs, a Threadripper 7xxx system can take 2TB of RAM. And that's on a single socket board. If you went dual socket EPYC, the max RAM would be 4 TB.

How much energy would it deaw? Looks juicy not gonna lie cause i need a build for next year. Gor Houdini simulations.

I was racking my brain trying to figure out how you got 40 cores under $800…when I have a 36 core T7920 under my desk. Lmao I’m stoked Skylake-EP is getting super affordable. Big core counts, lots of PCIe lanes, and common bifurcation support makes it a nice upgrade over Haswell/Broadwell. Mine’s running a ProxMox lab after I pulled it from NAS duty in favor of a 4c Kaby Lake Xeon.

What version of windows did you use? Have they finally enabled consumer platforms to utilise 2 physical processors again?

Putting your SSD in the hottest freakin place? Good luck yo

whats the lowest idle power this does

Put a Intel Arc to decode the h.264 or h.265 via quick sync and you can use this system or your previous system whitout problems, worked wonders for me.

XEON GANG LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO! I bought a used Dell T5810 Workstation, added a second 200-something (240 I think?) GB SATA SSD, slapped in an RX 6600 and initially ran it with 12 Gigs of DDR4, but recently raised that to 20 GB of Ram, and replaced the Xeon E5-1650 V3 that it came with an E5-1650 V4, and I'm gaming pretty well. My next planned updates are to go for a Xeon 2697 V3, more SSD (maybe going for a 2TB M.2 and using a PCIE to M.2 converter), and maybe in a couple of years, getting a 6650 XT or a 6700 XT.

I got that SSD, make sure to do the firmware update on it from solidigm. Mine was 6.4tb for $350. Pcie4 rated for 5dwpd for 5 years. Dell still lists the exact same drive as a bto option on their server builds for $18k. Mine had zero hours. I have been so frustrated by computers in recent years. Mostly expensive for slow (single threaded) server grade hardware. Last summer I deployed an epyc 9124 (zen 4 3.7ghz) with a supermicro motherboard so I get 12 ddr5 channels, 112 PCIe lanes, and decent single threaded performance. The single threaded cpu performance was 2 times faster than the fastest frequency optimized zen3 epyc.

hmmm, got me thinking this would be a good candidate for my home lab server.

I am constrained to high single thread performance which means I have an i9-13900k for After Effects, it does benefit from more cores with multi frame rendering but not enough to justify pure core systems aside from latest gen threadripper, which is not cheap.

Did you say you were on Miyconst's discord? RAD man. That's one of my tech discord hang outs.

Have you thought about something like an Intel Arc card for AV1 encoding? I think that could probably help out your workflow for video editing quite a bit

I bought a used dell t7810 and upgraded it to 44cores with 512gb ram. Never been happier for analysis for imaging. Everything else crawls.

The right tool for the job :)

With four channel RAM, as opposed to two channel, you just take the RAM speed and double it since you've doubled the channels and throughput. So 2133MHz would be equivalent to 4266MHz in two channel. Combined with the huge L3 CPU cache and....

13:02 The storage warning is perfect.

Man that was an awesome video time to retire the T410!!

I'm *REALLY* interested in this setup's power consumption & how loud does it get under different loads. I would give it a try without GPUs as a home lab server with virtualization. Would you 🙏please consider making such video? Thanks!

How much power does it use on idle?

i got mine single slot 14 core for rougly 400, plus duties from UK. i plan to upgrade on the go to 28 core.

Hope you get better, back issues suck!

damn: this video made me think a lot. i need a video editing machine plus music production (ableton 11) and i need capture 4k30 fps/4x 1080p webcams, you may have inspired some purchases

Good video!

Very nice. I also considered a very similar route with either the Dell or the Lenovo dual CPU machines. But there is that issue with a lot of software unable to make use of both CPUs. I watched a LOT of Miyconst videos as well. Turns out that there is a Xeon chip with 18 cores and 36 threads, but not all cores can Turbo Boost. Except Miyconst and his friends found a way to unlock Turbo on ALL cores. It's the Xeon E5-2699 v3. This is only a 3.6GHz boost clock. But with 18 cores, even at that speed you need some pretty aggressive cooling. HOWEVER, it turns out that there is a special version of this CPU. It's NOT on the Intel Ark database, which means that this was a custom configuration for a single OEM. I'm guessing for a Mac Pro, but I have no idea. What I DO know is that this variation, the E5-2696 v3 is the same silicon as the 2699, except that it has a max boost clock of 3.9GHz. Plus it has some additional instruction sets not found on the commercial version. And thanks to the BIOS injection revealed by Miyconst, et al, with water cooling that means 36 threads at 3.9GHz, which should be buttery smooth for editing. I'm a little chuffed that my 3080 FE only has 10Gb of VRAM, but everything I've read about the cards packed with RAM chips from this generation forward tells me that they are just running too hot. They will work fine for a while, but sooner or later they are going to fail. Not like my GTX 980 Ti that is as good as the day I bought it. In fact, it's going into the same rig. And I can keep the VRAM on the 3080 at 80° max under stress tests And aside from using the 980 analog output just for dedicated gaming on CRT (that never gets old), I can still do things like dedicate OBS capture to it, separate from the 3080, and use its 6Gb of VRAM for additional compute power for rendering or whatever. The machine is 3/4 built right now, just modifying the case for an external drive bay and add some additional fans. I'm making the case have positive air pressure to keep out dust. All said and done, it will have an MSI x99A MB with the OEM version of the 2699 v3, 64Gb of Four Channel ECC RAM, a 1500w Seasonic PSU, a Corsair AIO, the RTX 3080 and GTX 980 Ti, 2.5GHz Wi-Fi, a 500Gb NVMe Samsung 980 system drive, plus a 2Tb Samsung 970 EVO working drive, a 16Tb Enterprise HDD for cold storage in a modified mid-tower whose name just left my mind. The popular one with the metal bar that hides the cables? And I've started a separate NAS device also with a couple of Enterprise level HDDs that will only serve as backup. And once any backups are complete, it will be disconnected from the network and the internet. But it's fun as hell building these kinds of rigs, and seeing just how much performance you can squeeze out while doing it on a budget. I love what you've done, and I'd REALLY like to talk you out of that Titan X. That is the VERY BEST card ever made with an analog output. Almost identical to my 980 Ti, with double the VRAM. I have a nice water cooler if you ever want to let it go....

im wondering if similar workstations are good for programming / running apps local on the PC does anyone know anything about that

just to clarify... did you replace the Dell T7820's power supply? if so, would any current power supply works as replacement?

I wonder who told you to get that keyboard❤

Wow, great work. I've a great trick in my mind, how do you think to install proxmox?

what about power consumption @exporting video?

Motherboard ya listed at $250 being sold online for like $700 in itself on most storefronts like ebay, fb, mercari

Going for 5950x wouldn’t be cheaper? And supports ECC too?

I’m on a ryzen 53600 system and well ordered a ryzen 9700xd3 now I need a mobo/ram/psu since my 750w ain’t gona be even close to enough

Wow, those workstations have jumped in price. Barebones ones are now 400ish.

I didnt know that this platform is getting cheap omg 🤤

Hi, what happens if you try to upgrade to Win 11?

Good video. I just wonder how close that an upgrade to a 5950x from a 3700x on your original rig would have gotten you to this Xeon tower's performance.

Can someone tell me if this Workstation supports Resizable Bar? Looking to use an Arc GPU if possible in a media server.