This was a small project to remedy some of my boredom due to the Covid-19 lockdown/shelter-in-place order in Washington which started on March 23, 2020. Compared to my previous computer builds, I took the aesthetic details up a notch with some magnetic blue LED strips. I had a Samsung SSD, MSI video card, and an EVGA PSU in my spare parts box which were integrated in this build. An interesting aspect of this build was that I used a recycled HP Z420 motherboard which did not include an I/O shield/backplate because it’s actually built into the original Z420 case which does not pop out. I found a seller from China via eBay who was selling backplates for HP Z420s and I’m guessing why those existed there was because many people re-purpose those motherboards into custom PCs builds so that lead to a demand for this product.
Below are the specs:
- CPU: Xeon E5-2650 v2 8 Core/16 Threads 20MB Cache 2.6-3.4GHz Turbo
- CPU Cooler: Deep Cool Gammaxx 400
- Motherboard: HP Z420
- RAM: 32GB (4 x 8GB) ECC Reg 1600Mhz
- SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 250GB
- HDD: HP/Seagate 2TB Enterprise 7200RPM 128MB Cache
- PSU: EVGA 500B 500W
- Case: Deepcool Gamer Storm Macube 310 White ATX
- Video Card: MSI 710 1GB Fanless
