This PC build took me about one month to accumulate all the parts for the cheap, mainly due to the wait on a decent new basic video card to go on sale. Many used video cards seem to be very bad value at the time of searching through the used marketplaces of eBay, Craig’s List, and Offerup. The platform was based on salvaged/refurbished Intel Sandy Bridge server hardware from early 2012. In addition, I took a substantial amount of risk in terms of compatibility especially with the RAM sticks since I didn’t know whether SK Hynix had SPD chips on them programmed to work with only select HP motherboards.
The Xeon E5-2689 CPU was very unique since Intel did not release it to the public, but only to OEMs. Like the RAM, I wasn’t certain if they would work with the motherboard. About one week after I acquired the CPU from eBay, the market price of the chip doubled for some unknown reason. Overall, I was very lucky since the machine posted on the first try and the price/performance was very low.
Specs:
- CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2689 2.6GHz Base – 3.6 GHz Boost 20MB L3 Cache 115W TDP (Salvaged/recycled)
- Cooler: Deepcool Gammaxx 400
- Motherboard: No-name x79 chipset-based (Actually H77) Mini-ATX Chinese unit with salvaged/recycled parts
- RAM: SK Hynix/HP 32GB, 4 x 8GB DDR3 ECC Registered Memory (Salvaged/recycled)
- Storage: Samsung 960 250GB M.2 NVMe SSD
- Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1650 Super SC Ultra 4GB GDDR6
- PSU: Corsair CX650M — 650 Watt 80 PLUS Bronze Certified Modular ATX PSU
- Case: Corsair Carbide Mid Tower 275R White w/Acrylic Windows
Futhermore, below was where I got some of the ideas to do this project/build.