Cheap refurbished OEM prebuilts

cheap refurbished OEM prebuilts

are they worth it? which companies fuck you the least with shitty proprietary parts?

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nah

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Dell, IBM. Hewlett-Packard

the real cost associated with this is in the mobo and ram, but that also gets converted into future upgrade paths.
only reason I'd ever buy a prebuilt is due to an exclusive form factor.

I bought pic related with no ram or hdd, but had an i5 2500. I had 8 gigs of ddr3 lying around and an old hard drive so now it’s a very comfy emulation box. Only cost me 40 Canadian

Look for local deals in sites like craigslist or fb marketplace. Of course ask for pics and whatnot.
I'd guess you can find a Core i5 ivy bridge or better for cheap, just upgrade the PSU and throw a SSD in there and be done with it.

any models in particular?

Makes me sad that Athlon and Pentium names got relegated to low end chips.

They're worth it for a stable work/home server machine. By the time you try to upgrade PS and Video they make lousy gaymen machines.

Pic related has an un-docmented front panel connector.

I wonder if anyone has managed to change the guts of one of these Dells to another case.

A lot of HP's uses propietary PSU connectors on the mobo.

That's when you go for a nice workstation that was built for high-end GPUs right out of the factory. Don't think I'll ever go back to technology legos.

HP Z600 and Lenovo C20 / D20 have 12 xeon cores and cheap as shit ecc ram for under $300.

Not that many. I have a modified hpe-210y (which is only 8 years old) that I put my own PSU and GPU into. But the mobo does limit me on ram and cpu choices.

Did this myself recently. Didn't even get an amazing deal, but with a PSU and GPU upgrade, it makes for a good gayman PC.

i7-2600 and 16gb ram for $220. Included a Win10 key.

>only reason I'd ever buy a prebuilt is due to an exclusive form factor.
I fucking want pic related designed for mini-ITX.
I actually bought one on eBay, only to find out it uses a proprietary board.
I'm tempted to just take a dremel and arc welder and just make it fit mini-ITX

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The board physically fits inside but the standoffs, I/O opening, and Expansion slots do not line up. Might just have to buy and shape a steel/aluminun sheet and just weld it onto the case, after cutting out the back panel completely.

I got a HP Z420 with a 6-core Xeon for like $300. It's pretty neat. Not the best spec'd system, but it could reasonably be built into a gaming computer. It does have a pretty beastly 600w PSU.

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The CPU cooler is also super weird.

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>only to find out it uses a proprietary board.
don't they all have proprietary boards?

No, I've pulled apart a few dell and hp pc's and while the short pcie and weird layoutd are frequent, they often use mini/micro atx boards, often without populating any of the pcie slots.

The super thin stuff or really, really weird layouts do tend ti have proprietary boards

couldn't find much info on the one I had ordered at the time. But I had already decided that I'll just modify it to make it work with what I needed. The case's front panel is what I liked the most, anyways.

Yes, definitely worth it. I buy Grade-A refurbs from Newegg for my clients all the time. Have yet to have any of them fail.

I've done it to an old dell when I was a teenager, the form factor on the older dimension XPS T100r's are similar to a standard one, the only thing that sucked was finding what pins were for power button, hdd led, power led, reset and sleep.

but don't with the newer ones.

They're cheap enough that you can buy them and not have to worry about upgrading anything aside from RAM and hard disks. I mean don't expect to use them to super heavy graphics workloads or gaming. But otherwise they're excellent workstations, especially the used Xeon models that support ECC RAM and have insane amounts of CPU cache.

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Athlon was never high end
You are thinking Phenom

>when you cheap out on a old-ass power hungry xeon
>end up paying the difference in energy bills anyway

Yes. My younger brother wanted a gaming PC, my parents are dirt poor. So I ended up grabbing a $80 i5 tower off my local electronic recycling place, and then slapping a GTX 680 into it that I got for $90. Pocketed an extra $50 too.