High Performance PC on a budget.

Ebay is flooded with Dell Precision Xeon workstations, mostly "off lease." The best one's are the dual CPU (two individual CPU's) Xeons. They go anywhere from $75.00 for single CPU to $400 for one's that are newer. Mine are from 2007. 2008, and 2010. These machines had slightly ahead of the game technology, like DDR 3 memory and Sata raids, which nowadays is not quite as old as the age of the machines would indicate.

I'm putting fast graphics cards, solid state drives, 32GB or more of ram, upgrading the power supply to the super quiet ones, and these machines are really solid and high performance. I've got around $350 in a machine that is more than equal to a fast i7 for $1,500 or more. The dual CPU Xeons actually handle multi-tasking better than a single i7. They can also be upgraded to quad core CPU's for not too much money, and that really puts them up there.

Running windows 10, I'm getting great performance with Autodesk Maya, 3D max, Aurora 3D, Lumion 3D, Swish Max, Adobe CS5.5, particularly Premiere and After Effects, and Flash.

The cases are full towers with 6 open PCI slots, 6 Sata drive bats, risers for more ram, plenty of room for extra fans. You can also easily adapt them for liquid cooling

This is a good example. I'm not the seller, nor do I sell them, don't know the seller, but I got a very comparable deal for just a little less. I'd recommend these for someone wanting to build a killer machine on a budget.

Dell Precision 690 2X Xeon 5160 3GHz Dual Core CPUs 32GB Mem 1TB FX4500 | eBay

They also sell the Dell M1000 blade setups for around $300 and Xeon modules for less than $100 with hot swappable power supply and hard drives. This would be cool to load up linux and use NFS to ape them all together and get a low end render farm/supercomputer.

Storage is getting cheaper these days as well. We're starting to see "petabyte" arrays too, but they are not cheap. A 25 petabyte (25,000 gigabytes) array is runs around $300K

 

I paid $40 for 32GB installed before they shipped it, that's not bad at all. It is DDR3 1600 MHZ and it works great.That's pretty cheap in RAM prices today.

 

That's a great deal based on what I've gotten on these boxes. All three of mine are percing away all day.

 

If it was trans orange it wasn't worth it.....any other color, sure.

Seriously....I look at PC's more like big caclulators, guitars are art. Both in the making and in the playing.