Question Is this PC worth building?

[BrutalHero]

Hi,

I have in my hands a HP Z8 G4 Motherboard with 2 Xeon Gold 6128 3.4ghz CPUS and 2 RTX 5000 Graphics cards and around 400 gb of DDR4 Ram..

I am only missing the case to setup everything together, which will cost me around 500 euro.

My Question: Is it worth paying the 500 euro to make this setup or it's better off selling all the parts individually and buying an I9 9900k with an RTX 3080.

Computer Usage : Game Development (Unreal Engine 5, Unity) Photoshop, Blender , Gaming and normal daily tasks.

 

[DavidM012]

No I think sell everything and buy new gaming PC, if you can find a market for it since that 'unused potential' is pointless. And since you can't really mess around with the power situation because you don't have the UPS for it.

Because the workstation 'could' potentially run blender, unreal engine, photoshops, games, internet and everything concurrently and you could load it up with multiple tasks and easily task switch which would use more of it but the power situation is not really tested and so what you can't really do safely at the moment is 'test it's full potential'.

Since a UPS for it, a 15 or 20amp ups at that is also probably mega bucks, then maybe best in the end to sell it to someone who can use it to it's full potential and build your gaming PC with some 3d app ability.

 

[DavidM012]

There may be a market for your workstation. What you can do is maybe set it up with 256gb of ram and sell the remainder separately as optional extras since maybe nobody wants 352gb of ram anyway. All you can do is list it and you can say it's working but hasn't been stress tested. People who are fussed about that sort of thing will know what it means which might affect it's value. You also have to contend with the listing fees and so on... so sort out what you want to do. Basically get the most powerful gaming PC you can afford and if it can blender and run other 3d apps, ok but in the end you will be constrained with how far you can go with it by your budget.

After all a more high end workstation is megabucks.

 

[DavidM012]

Also a buyer could economize a bit more if you sold the all the 3200mhz dimms separately and they bought 2600mhz dimms for it elsewhere instead. Having the 3200mhz dimms in it means you are using higher specification dimms than it needs and underclocking them so under-utilizing some of their value. That's something you could leverage if there is a market for it.

 

[BrutalHero]

Or even sell the workstation with only 64gb of dimms (4) installed and sell the rest separately. A slight variation on the theme. That way a buyer could choose to buy only as much ram with it as they want. As to it's value well you can only test what people are willing to pay by dicing with ebay listing fees. 2k euro is probably less that it's worth with that much 352gb of memory in it I should think. Just shoot for what your gaming PC budget is and try to get the best you can for it.
The modern PC will suit your gaming requirements nicely but it could be sacrificing some 3d apps ability. f you aren't using all it's potential, well why play basketball, badminton, or table tennis on a football field?

So, shave off some multi tasking ability and unused capacity (and power consumption) and stick it on to a higher single core scored modern pc. Really in principle what you need to do is go as high on the CPU power as you can afford. In order to be able to do as much of the range of things you want as possible.

I think between now and 2025 when windows 10 retires your workstation is maybe good for a few more 3d jobs and then that'll be that.

So... selling it now to folks who can capitalize on it for a couple more years could be a more of a win-win.

Thank you, I will look into that and I will try to sell it. Although I tried ebay but it doesnt allow me to list anything above 650$.

I will see if there is a market here in my region for this kind of computers.

 

[DavidM012]

Or even sell the workstation with only 64gb of dimms (4) installed and sell the rest separately. A slight variation on the theme. That way a buyer could choose to buy only as much ram with it as they want. As to it's value well you can only test what people are willing to pay by dicing with ebay listing fees. 2k euro is probably less that it's worth with that much 352gb of memory in it I should think. Just shoot for what your gaming PC budget is and try to get the best you can for it.
The modern PC will suit your gaming requirements nicely but it could be sacrificing some 3d apps ability.

If you aren't using all it's potential, well why play basketball, badminton, or table tennis on a football field?

So, shave off some multi tasking ability and unused capacity (and power consumption) and stick it on to a higher single core scored modern pc. Really in principle what you need to do is go as high on the CPU power as you can afford. In order to be able to do as much of the range of things you want as possible.

I think between now and 2025 when windows 10 retires your workstation is maybe good for a few more 3d jobs and then that'll be that.

So... selling it now to folks who can capitalize on it for a couple more years could be a more of a win-win.

 

[DavidM012]

Oh so your Ebay only lets you sell items $650 apiece. Well that trends in the direction of selling the parts separately so that market would be for people looking for spares for their workstations. That might not be so large and so take a while to sell. How many people have $10,000 workstations? So some people might only want a few dimms, others might want a CPU and so on. Breaking it up could leave you with an incomplete system that doesn't work and not as much as you wanted for your gaming PC.

So try to sell the system complete with your 5000p gpu and 64gb of ram and the second one with the quadro gpu's with 64gb ram. You only have one case and PSU and two motherboards. Sorting out how you sell it all will be tricky but if it's working and people want spares, you could cash it in. They don't get much of a warranty so you'll need to sell at a sharp price.

Then the rest of the dimms could be optional extras. Or else try to sell each component individually since they could also buy 2600mhz dimms elsewhere for the mobo and cpu's and economize on it that way. Or sell the gpu's and mobo's as tested working but not stressed' and the 3200mhz dimms separately since they could maybe just buy 2600mhz dimms cheaper elsewhere and not under utilize the 3200mhz dimms on it. There may be another (second hand) market for the 3200mhz dimms for people who want spares.

It would be nice to have the part numbers of the DIMMS that you have so you can list that instead of '3200mhz hp 16gb dimms'. You could search for similar dimms and guess the exact part number if you find similar ones the same but they might not be exactly the same.

So solving the SPD read problem might help you identify the dimms more easily, if they don't have any writing on the labels.

Also run memtest86 on all your dimms so you know they're all good before you sell them.

 

[DavidM012]

Or another possible combination. Buy your 19-12900k or ks rig and use the quadros in it with a 3080 or 3090 for gaming so basically have 3 gpus and get a monster 1600w psu for it while selling the rest of the workstation parts so then you get to keep the rendering power of the quadros and get the gaming power of the rtx3000 series. So then you have to look for a mobo that can support 3 gpus.

There just doesn't seem to be a way of getting the best of both worlds without going to the very highest class of cpu possible which is probably too expensive.

You either sacrifice multitasking for gaming or sacrifice gaming for multi tasking.

Also Intel is releasing the 13900k and amd is releasing zen 4 so more cpu's will be available. Basically all the faffing around is so you can game on it more at higher resolutions.

The gains for 3d applications are marginal since the score of the dual xeons for blender is so similar to the 19-12900k and you won't have as much memory for multi tasking and there is also more faffing around to find out if you can keep 256gb or 128gb or 64gb of your current collection of dimms to use with a new mobo.

It's just removing that dual cpu architecture for a single cpu architecture does reduce the ability to task switch between apps even if the modern cpu has the same or more threads.

And all of this is so highly subjective. It's what you want for some amount of gaming and some amount of 3d rendering since you could probably do the rendering on the workstation but not the gaming at the highest settings you like.

The only thing for sure so far is that you aren't really satisfied with it's gaming performance. And yet still, you can't test the blendering without risking power problems at this point. There's more risk in going for a UPS to test it at full power.

So I'd bail and just go for a new build.

 

[DavidM012]

And the 4000 series... well I guess all that depends on how much you make and what price it releases at. And another way to read the dimms spd might be to simply install them in another computer. If they are compatible and the machine will start you can try that. The part number of the dimms is really important to help you sell them.

And I just want to know if you understand that the HP dimms you have are of a specification more than what the Xeons need. The maximum memory speed the Xeon Cpu's support is 2600mhz. So if you use dimms of greater specification eg. 3200mhz, 3600mhz, or 4000mhz they will simply run at 2600mhz on it. This is called 'underclocking' the dimms.

So why they were used initially could have been for a couple of reasons. One was that was all they had in stock at the time, another possible is by the time they were used the 3200mhz dimms were similarly priced to the 2600 dimms.

Anyway this 'underclocking' of dimms is still used sometimes since some variety 4000mhz modules can be similarly priced to 3200mhz modules so might as well use them and underclock.

Also memory is produced in 2 forms, ECC which has an extra few bits for error correction and non-ECC which is the type of memory (dimm modules) commonly used in desktop PC's these days.

So your DIMMs might be of the ECC variety which commands a bit of a premium over non-ECC dimms so it's really important to identify your dimms.

 

[BrutalHero]

And the 4000 series... well I guess all that depends on how much you make and what price it releases at. And another way to read the dimms spd might be to simply install them in another computer. If they are compatible and the machine will start you can try that. The part number of the dimms is really important to help you sell them.

And I just want to know if you understand that the HP dimms you have are of a specification more than what the Xeons need. The maximum memory speed the Xeon Cpu's support is 2600mhz. So if you use dimms of greater specification eg. 3200mhz, 3600mhz, or 4000mhz they will simply run at 2600mhz on it. This is called 'underclocking' the dimms.

So why they were used initially could have been for a couple of reasons. One was that was all they had in stock at the time, another possible is by the time they were used the 3200mhz dimms were similarly priced to the 2600 dimms.

Anyway this 'underclocking' of dimms is still used sometimes since some variety 4000mhz modules can be similarly priced to 3200mhz modules so might as well use them and underclock.

Also memory is produced in 2 forms, ECC which has an extra few bits for error correction and non-ECC which is the type of memory (dimm modules) commonly used in desktop PC's these days.

So your DIMMs might be of the ECC variety which commands a bit of a premium over non-ECC dimms so it's really important to identify your dimms.

Thanks for all the info,

I was thinking about getting the 4090 and then 12900ks but I cannot find a buyer for the system at a decent price. Mostly people that lowball and want the system for 1.5k.

I recently tried to play battlefield v and I realized that it was stuttering a lot , when I tried to lower the quality to low it literally dropped to 10 fps, only at ultra settings it was running above 80 with stutters.

I will check the memory dimms this weekend and I will send you a detailed picture of them.

I really want to sell this system as I won't be using this much power and it's just a waste but I cannot find a buyer for it.

 

[BrutalHero]

Oh so your Ebay only lets you sell items $650 apiece. Well that trends in the direction of selling the parts separately so that market would be for people looking for spares for their workstations. That might not be so large and so take a while to sell. How many people have $10,000 workstations? So some people might only want a few dimms, others might want a CPU and so on. Breaking it up could leave you with an incomplete system that doesn't work and not as much as you wanted for your gaming PC.

So try to sell the system complete with your 5000p gpu and 64gb of ram and the second one with the quadro gpu's with 64gb ram. You only have one case and PSU and two motherboards. Sorting out how you sell it all will be tricky but if it's working and people want spares, you could cash it in. They don't get much of a warranty so you'll need to sell at a sharp price.

Then the rest of the dimms could be optional extras. Or else try to sell each component individually since they could also buy 2600mhz dimms elsewhere for the mobo and cpu's and economize on it that way. Or sell the gpu's and mobo's as tested working but not stressed' and the 3200mhz dimms separately since they could maybe just buy 2600mhz dimms cheaper elsewhere and not under utilize the 3200mhz dimms on it. There may be another (second hand) market for the 3200mhz dimms for people who want spares.

It would be nice to have the part numbers of the DIMMS that you have so you can list that instead of '3200mhz hp 16gb dimms'. You could search for similar dimms and guess the exact part number if you find similar ones the same but they might not be exactly the same.

So solving the SPD read problem might help you identify the dimms more easily, if they don't have any writing on the labels.

Also run memtest86 on all your dimms so you know they're all good before you sell them.

I am located in the Netherlands and people here tend to lowball a lot, I belive even with this system configuration I won't get much success.

People even lowball for the rtx 5000 , they offer me only 500 euro.

 

[DavidM012]

Yes, however it's all second hand gear. It is worth more like you think but what you buy when you buy a product new from a manufacturer is the warranty and that's what's really worth anything and after the warranty expires any longevity after that is just good luck and value for money. Also sometimes you can economise on things with refurbishments. but that isn't a good idea with graphics cards anyway.

It depends if the manufacturer actually has any refurbishment scheme, or if you can pay some electronics whizz to do it. Not sure what happened to fixing things these days. Well if someone's selling a gpu for 25% of it's value, you know you don't have any recourse. The customers are risking their money too. You're fishing in the end of the market that doesn't have a lot to spare and knows how to haggle.

So if people won't bite perhaps your other option is to research the Xeon cpu's a bit and go higher. However I wouldn't think too much of that as an option because it only has like 2.25 years until windows 10 retires and then well how will people keep their windows 10 boxes going? And the Xeon Cpu's aren't going to be cheap and then you don't know if second hand ones are working either. They also know how to 'hi ball' gear when they're selling it apparently!

By the way, had another last thought about the SPD read problem. If you install the 'Chipset drivers' from the utilities page of the HP support site (if you haven't done so already) this might fix the ability of the system to read SPD.

You can check that also since, memtest86 & the bios of the mobo should be able to read spd. If they can and windows can't then it's probably simply because of the chipset drivers.


Not sure sending me a photo of the dimms will do any good. If there is no writing on the label I can't know what they are either.

If you want a valuation of them, you need to read the SPD and search the part number or else read the part number in another computer and write it down the full exact part number or (sku) on a piece of paper and type and search it.

If I were selling I would look at what others are selling at and undercut them by $5 or $10 bucks - if the dimms had been tested. But that's me - how you go about it is your business. Being eager for a 'new build'.

Another hurdle in your plan is deciding which of your collection of dimms to keep for use with a new mobo.

So you must look at the qvl for 'your board of choice' to determine which of your dimms are compatible if any. I would want to keep the maximum amount of memory possible just so I could mess about with ram disks. Eg. keep up to 128gb or 256gb depending on the size of the modules or whatever fits in the budget and is compatible. I don't know if you have any 32gb or 64gb modules. If you only have 16gb modules you can probably only keep 64gb for a new board since it will only have 4 dimm slots.

Some games being over 100gb or more would only fit on a large ramdisk and have some very nice level transitions.

Your collection of drives aren't really worth anything second hand I wouldn't have thought - they are worth something to you if they save you the cost of new drives. The unknown usage and reliability and having no warranty is no good for selling really. You could only sell them for dirt probably.

The option of last resort is finding a low or mid range amd or nvidia gaming card like a gtx 1660super or amd XT equivalent and gaming with that. Stop trying to game on the quadros. They aren't meant for that. Here's a list of gpu's .

The problem with that approach again is frittering away the budget for a new build that has more of a shelf life. And the problem with the new build, good for games, only about roughly equal for 3d utilities and not so good at multi tasking. An inferior gaming gpu obviously won't be as good on modern titles either, as a 3000 series.

well you could maybe go for a z690 mobo with a 12900ks or upcoming z790mobo with a 13900k if you want everything the most up to date.

Try to sell 2 mobos 4 cpus and 3 gpus and the hp case and make a heap of your winnings. Also now I am frightened if you understand that you can't use the hp case for anything else because the amperage is too high on the psu. You have to resell it.

You should have enough for a complete new gaming system. Whether it's equal to or less than the xeons for 3d apps will remain a mystery...

 

[BrutalHero]

Yes, however it's all second hand gear. It is worth more like you think but what you buy when you buy a product new from a manufacturer is the warranty and that's what's really worth anything and after the warranty expires any longevity after that is just good luck and value for money. Also sometimes you can economise on things with refurbishments. but that isn't a good idea with graphics cards anyway.

It depends if the manufacturer actually has any refurbishment scheme, or if you can pay some electronics whizz to do it. Not sure what happened to fixing things these days. Well if someone's selling a gpu for 25% of it's value, you know you don't have any recourse. The customers are risking their money too. You're fishing in the end of the market that doesn't have a lot to spare and knows how to haggle.

So if people won't bite perhaps your other option is to research the Xeon cpu's a bit and go higher. However I wouldn't think too much of that as an option because it only has like 2.25 years until windows 10 retires and then well how will people keep their windows 10 boxes going? And the Xeon Cpu's aren't going to be cheap and then you don't know if second hand ones are working either. They also know how to 'hi ball' gear when they're selling it apparently!

By the way, had another last thought about the SPD read problem. If you install the 'Chipset drivers' from the utilities page of the HP support site (if you haven't done so already) this might fix the ability of the system to read SPD.

You can check that also since, memtest86 & the bios of the mobo should be able to read spd. If they can and windows can't then it's probably simply because of the chipset drivers.


Not sure sending me a photo of the dimms will do any good. If there is no writing on the label I can't know what they are either.

If you want a valuation of them, you need to read the SPD and search the part number or else read the part number in another computer and write it down the full exact part number or (sku) on a piece of paper and type and search it.

If I were selling I would look at what others are selling at and undercut them by $5 or $10 bucks - if the dimms had been tested. But that's me - how you go about it is your business. Being eager for a 'new build'.

Another hurdle in your plan is deciding which of your collection of dimms to keep for use with a new mobo.

So you must look at the qvl for 'your board of choice' to determine which of your dimms are compatible if any. I would want to keep the maximum amount of memory possible just so I could mess about with ram disks. Eg. keep up to 128gb or 256gb depending on the size of the modules or whatever fits in the budget and is compatible. I don't know if you have any 32gb or 64gb modules. If you only have 16gb modules you can probably only keep 64gb for a new board since it will only have 4 dimm slots.

Some games being over 100gb or more would only fit on a large ramdisk and have some very nice level transitions.

Your collection of drives aren't really worth anything second hand I wouldn't have thought - they are worth something to you if they save you the cost of new drives. The unknown usage and reliability and having no warranty is no good for selling really. You could only sell them for dirt probably.

The option of last resort is finding a low or mid range amd or nvidia gaming card like a gtx 1660super or amd XT equivalent and gaming with that. Stop trying to game on the quadros. They aren't meant for that. Here's a list of gpu's .

The problem with that approach again is frittering away the budget for a new build that has more of a shelf life. And the problem with the new build, good for games, only about roughly equal for 3d utilities and not so good at multi tasking. An inferior gaming gpu obviously won't be as good on modern titles either, as a 3000 series.

well you could maybe go for a z690 mobo with a 12900ks or upcoming z790mobo with a 13900k if you want everything the most up to date.

Try to sell 2 mobos 4 cpus and 3 gpus and the hp case and make a heap of your winnings. Also now I am frightened if you understand that you can't use the hp case for anything else because the amperage is too high on the psu. You have to resell it.

You should have enough for a complete new gaming system. Whether it's equal to or less than the xeons for 3d apps will remain a mystery...

I tried to update the chipset driver as HP said it needs upading but the 2666 MHz is still displaying, so I will have to further check the rams.

The Dimms have labels and everything on them so it will be easier for you to see , they are official from HP .
Also I think I may have messed up something as I also had some extra 2666MHz dimms which I noticed now and I am thinking if one of the rams is 2666MHz inside the pc.

I tried increasing my limit on ebay to sell everything as a whole but I cannot do that, is there any other website like ebay that I can sell this pc?

Like you said quadros aren't for gaming so I think I will just try to sell one for 900-1000 and then buy an rtx 3080-90

 

[DavidM012]

That is the correct 2666 or maximum speed value of the memory controller of the Xeon 6128 cpu's. Your dimms are 3200mhz dimms which are of a greater specification than the machine needs. The reason why they were used is probably because it was all they had in stock at the time.

In other words the 3200mhz dimms are underclocked to 2600mhz or 2666mhz because the CPU's cannot run them at 3200mhz only at 2666mhz. The base clock of the CPU is 1333mhz and double data rate (ddr4 dimms) are 1333mhz x 2, 2666mhz.

The SPD (serial presence detect) which is used with cpu-z, rammon, and hwinfo softwares is to read the specification of the DIMMs (amongst other info) which contains the Part Number or SKU (stock keeping unit) which gives you the information necessary to identify the exact variant of the dimms (memory) that are installed in the machine. There are many varieties of memory.


Buying an RTX 3080 will not improve your FPS in gaming. The CPU is what drives the FPS and the 6128's aren't the fastest single core -scored CPU's on the range. Nothing can make them faster and you'll still get low fps in gaming particularly if you try to go high settings with a 3080.

That's the reason for selecting a 'less powerful gpu' like the AMD 5700xt for example because it's a better match for the cpu speed. Not the top performers either though.

The only way to improve your gaming performance is to go higher on the CPU scale to a stronger CPU and also have a gaming GPU that's a good match for it.

In other words a different CPU to the xeon that has a superior single core score in benchmarks is better for gaming and a different CPU means a different motherboard with a different socket such as a normal gaming mobo like the ROG Maximus Hero z690 (lga socket 1700) and a Socket 1700 cpu like the i9-12900k.

These examples are at the higher end of the hardware scale for gaming and pricier. After all you could just buy an entry level i3 12100 cpu and use it with an entry level lga 1700 mobo which would be cheap.

 

[DavidM012]

The Chipset Drivers:

Navigate to this link

Click on the second link from the top. Navigate to software, drivers, and firmware.. select os windows 10 - 64 bit

Click on the +

Do not download the bios. For the moment forget that BIOSes exist. Download and install the chipset drivers. This will fix the ability (hopefully) of windows to read the SPD of the memory in HWInfo so you can retrieve the Part Number of the dimms and search them.

Don't give strange bioses or PC's updates if they ask for them. You don't know what it does and you shouldn't do anything much besides try to read diagnostic info of a machine you're planning to sell.

 

[DavidM012]

To compare cpu speeds you can look up the benchmark:

https://technical.city/en/cpu/Xeon-Gold-6128-vs-Core-i3-12100

For example the core i3-12100 has basically an identical single threaded score to the xeon 6128. This tells you, that it will behave the same for gaming, low fps, entry level standard, doesn't go fast. There is no gain to switching to a i3-12100 even though you could spend money on a certain amount of hardware.

https://technical.city/en/cpu/Xeon-Gold-6128-vs-Core-i9-12900K

This one tells you that the higher-end for gaming 12900k cpu has about 4x the single core score in the benchmark and is about 4x the better gaming cpu.

The 24 threads you have with the dual Xeons (12 for each cpu) is 6 physical cores per cpu with 2 (virtual) threads each.

The 24 threads of the i9 12900k are 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency core so 16 cores makes 24 threads. It is basically a whole lot more CPU. P-cores have 2 threads and E cores have 1 thread to make 24 in total. So there's more physical cpu cores per thread that boost performance overall.

So it's better for gaming and better for multithreaded tasks. It has a higher multi core score too than the xeons. However the dual CPU architecture counts for something in task switching (alt tabbing) or running multiple apps at once.

Think of CPU 1 as Jarvis and CPU 2 as Ultron. on your dual Xeons. They can run side by side and don't have to share so many resources.

However, in the single CPU architecture of the i9 cpu, Jarvis and Ultron would be using more shared resources. Overall though, the i9-12900k is basically faster at everything so, even though they share resources you don't see any slowdown. It simply means that all the system resources are packaged together tightly.

In the dual architecture system, one CPU could go out while the other would keep on going. In the single CPU architecture, there is less fault tolerance overall in the whole system.

In many scenarios the fast single cpu architecture is more useful. A dual cpu architecture is more fault tolerant, and useful in scenarios where you need a server to keep running if a CPU fails, hence the facility for 'hot swapping' cpus on some dual cpu server class systems - for emergency use by qualified technician only.

Never attempt to hot swap your CPU's! There is simply no reason to do so in these conditions. You aren't running enterprise level applications that need 100% uptime.

So basically you would be building a machine that is more or less similar to your xeon rig... with a few modern enhancements. It has all the same football field sized resources in a smaller package.