[dervjd]

Take it from someone who has done this - it's a terrible idea.

I bought a HP Z620 off of eBay for $500 in 2019. Spec'd with 2x Xeon E5-2680 @2.7GHZ & 96GB of RAM, and had a 1TB SSD. Bought a RX570 graphics card, and away I went.

It's been an absolute pain in the ass: heavy, huge, tempermental, and sucks an enormous amount of power. Idles at 250-300watts just sitting at the login screen. My home office temperature goes up by several degrees when it's on.

It's also noisy, but not from the fans. There's noticeable coil whine/high pitched sounds when the computer is not idling. You probably wouldn't hear it over the background noise in a normal office, but you definitely hear it at home. And of course it sounds like a rocket when the fans are going full blast, which I'll admit is kind of fun.

Reliability has been a crapshoot - motherboard died and I had to source another from eBay. Pretty sure one of the RAM sticks is dying too - every few months it crashes hard (with an error screen mentioning a memory issue) but HP's hardware testing tools find nothing. Upside: very easy to take apart and replace the motherboard - everything is modular and slots out.

Software wise - all kinds of weird driver issues, especially with power management. Sleep mode usually crashes the machine. Of course none of the drivers have been updated in years, and Windows 11 isn't officially supported. ESXi works well enough after some BIOS tinkering - could not get GPU passthrough to work, and some of the system sensors aren't detected. Bare metal Windows 11 install works after some minor registry changes, but not officially supported.

The most irritating part of this tale is that I didn't buy this to be my daily driver.

I've always had a home server, and thought it would be fun to have the extra CPU/RAM power on tap to spin up VMs with reckless abandon. Well after all the issues with the Z620, I ended up buying a Dell OptiPlex Micro with 32GB of RAM & an i5-10500T. It's the size of a book, cost about the same as the Z620, is silent, sips power, and has been dead reliable. Granted, it's not as powerful - the E5-2680 has a 12,500 passmark score (and there's two of them) versus the i5-10500T's 10,319 passmark score. However this has never actually been an issue for me.

Tldr: There's a reason these dinosaurs are cheap. Power hogs, noisy, unreliable, and a giant hassle.

[watmough]

As much as love Z620's in particular, my experience of a used one wasn't that great. In particular, watch for v1.0/v2.0 motherboard versions that prevent you from using the faster Xeons, and in general, the model seems to suffer from power supply problems. Just as I got my dual-processor 64Gig Z620 working under macOS, the 2nd processor daughterboard quit. Similar experience on my work Z620 at the time. Exact same failure. Better just to reset and build the fastest thing you can afford. My fast box runs a Ryzen 9 5900x and is 4x faster than my 2019 Razer Blade 15" for building the software I work on.

[fmajid]

Gresham’s law at work. If a company is shedding half its workstations due to upgrades, the stable and reliable ones used by non-smokers are not going out first.