This a dual Xeon 48 gig beast for under $700 buckle up because it wasn’t easy hint because of these two guys now I think the best place to start this story is with the purchase of my first HP z 800 server look at me here talking all proudly about my new purchase now the refurbished processor india did tell me that it wasn’t working and he cited power supply issues as the problem and then with a quick google of HP’s at 800 power supply issues there seems to be a very common issue with capacitors going bad in these power supplies.
it seems to be fairly user serviceable so I bought the PC and what I actually got it I opened up the power supply and obviously I had no idea what was going on inside there wasn’t like an obviously burst capacitor or anything like that so I decided I and I’m quite embarrassed to admit this but I actually called HP’s customer service hotline and started asking the lady about how to actually diagnose a broken capacitor in one of these power supplies quite understandably the lady was really confused as to why I was digging around the insides of one of their power supplies and then she in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice said well.
how do you know the power supply is broken and she was right obviously how did I know the power supply was broken so I went through all of the steps of diagnosing what was wrong with the Machine and then I ended up realizing that the motherboard power supply cable wasn’t making proper contact and when I pulled it out a little bit the PC action he switched on so then I pushed it back in hoping that it would continue to work because you know it would have proper contact now or whatever and well it didn’t so when I started fishing around for that point where it switched on again I accidentally set fire to a graphics card rest in peace my good.
Destroying you in your prime really catching on fire isn’t the most ideal way to die and at this point I was actually worried that I had destroyed both of the Zeon X 56 75 CPUs as well and all 48 gigs of RAM but I decided to power ahead with my endeavour anyway so then I started to look for a different solution and weirdly enough the easiest one was also the cheapest one I found a website that sells refurbished old HP servers and they per grudgingly sold me an HP z800 server with no CPUs and no Ram unit which is like the only components I really cared about the first PC and they actually sold it to me for less money than just buying a Hz 800 power supply off of xfurbish and this actually brings me to the build portion and with that it’s time to actually see whether the conglomeration of the components between the two machines actually works and our first things first we have to actually set the CPUs in the correct position I love the fact that I have to say CPUs multiple and not just one very excited to see how this PC performs the big issue with this motherboard is that it doesn’t have the triangle in the corner of the socket to kind of help you determine which way around you need to put the CPU in so you have to kind of match the pin array.
the actual socket which is obviously not ideal sorry I looked like there was some bent pins in that no I think no worry I’m going to clean them a bit better before I put a new thermal paste on and there’s no crunching sound when I close the actual CPU socket so that’s good all the pins on being destroyed so let me give them a good wife town it’s the final wipe down and then I’m going to mount the actual coolers now as far as CPU coolers go I’m not going to use the little dainty loser CPU coolers I’m actually gonna replace them with these two of them this is the black edition of the hyper 212 I’ve seen of someone mounting them in this case so that’s why I actually chose them because there’s not much clearance and according to you can just screw the standoffs that comes with the cooler straight into the motherboard backplate.
So that you don’t have to remove the motherboard from the case now unfortunately I’ve run into a little bit of a snag so over here is the actual kind of standoff that you have to screw into the motherboard to be able to mount that cooler master cooler and the actual hole for a standoff screwing in the back plate is a tiny bit too small I took the motherboard out because I thought that I could just remove the backplate and use my own back plate but the backplate is actually a part of this socket so there’s no way to remove it so I think I have two options at this point one of them is I could just use the stock coolers on this and then be done with it but that’s really lame so then I have a second option which is to drill out the actual screw holes there but that’s terrifying taking a drill to a mounting or two mounting hardware that’s actually attached to a motherboard.
how that pans out I’m gonna get a drill and I’m gonna kind of see how terrifying that’s gonna be okay so we’re just gonna have to take a quick moment to appreciate the fact that I am a genius because I figured out a way to mount it now as you can see here with the actual AMD mounting hardware it uses these screws through the back of the actual backplate which I’ll illustrate with some b-roll so then the screw comes up through the base so that you can attach these standoffs and then actually mount the cooler now that I’ve macgyvered the CPU coolers.
on to the CPUs it’s time to actually see whether or not this PC works now the last try that I had in the first configuration of the PC the graphics card actually caught on fire like I mentioned earlier so I’m quite scared I’m not going to put like a 1060 which I’m going to use eventually into the PC on the first try because I don’t want to destroy it so over here we have a sacrificial GPU it’s a GTX 285 and it’s not worth much so that’s kind of why we’re gonna use that in the PC if it catches on fire it’s not going to be a disaster so let’s put it in there and see how it goes so now that I’ve effectively infuriated an ax plugged everything in including the sacrificial GPU hopefully it works I’m really hoping that everything doesn’t catch on fire because I spent so much time on this already and I’m not even done with it yet okay so I know you can kind of point at the PC there’s some cables in the fans that’s already a bad sign I think it lives well we’ve got that going got this going so the peripherals are lighting up it hasn’t beeped yet oh the monitor might be off actually oh and it’s on the huh it’s on the wrong source as well I’m just building tension here guys it’s all I’m doing and now there’s no oh it lives okay so now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna install Windows on it.
how it works so we know that it’s not destroying graphics cards so I’m gonna plug the 1060 into it and we’re also gonna paint the actual side panels because they’re a bit scratched up so we’re gonna sand it down and gonna make sure that that looks all sexy like you saw in the intro we have the two panels over there I’m actually going to sand them first because they’ve got a bunch of scratches and stuff in them which I want to sand out and then I’m gonna paint it now the reason that I’m not gonna just sand them down and use the kind of like a brushed aluminium finish is because I’ve tried to hand sand a brushed aluminium finish in two aluminium before and it wasted hours of my life and it still didn’t work so I’m not going to do that to myself I’m just gonna sand it and paint it I’m actually gonna film it through the window so it’s gonna be pretty ghetto but it’s just gonna be a quick time-lapse anyway now before we get any further into I think it’s an actual good time to mention the specs of this pc behind me here now the cups are two intel Xeon x 56 75 six core cups with a base clock of 3.0 five gigahertz there’s 48 gigs of ram which I don’t think is ECC Ram I’ve then got a GTX 1060 palette super Jetstream as a GPU and that and for storage I’ve got a 250 gig samsung 860 Evo the actual coolers that I’m using like I mentioned at various points in this are cooler master hyper 212 Black Edition Eves which ended up not attaching nearly as easily as I thought they would now when I actually finished mounting the coolers to the motherboard I was really excited to put the motherboard back in the case but unfortunately because of the grooves in the backplate of the case it actually wouldn’t fit so I had to cut the backs of two of those square pins off to have it actually slide in and it is arguable whether or not it was worth it because this PC can’t actually overclock but they do run really hot with those stock loser coolers on so it’s still gonna make a difference now first things first the most exciting part how does it do at Cinebench and now with the Cinebench score out of the way let’s look at some gaming benchmarks.
How before I get into the final productivity test that I did let’s just do a quick rundown of the benchmarks and honestly at 1080p this PC performs really well but a lot of that is down to the GTX 1060 and it doesn’t seem like the CPUs bottleneck it too much but one of the biggest issues with this system is the fact that it can’t overclock and that’s what hurts it’s a Cinebench performance I think because at 3 gigahertz each individual core just isn’t fast enough and if you take into consideration the fact that my AMD dries in 1700 xcp you when overclocked can get a thousand nine hundred points in Cinebench this PC just doesn’t keep up and honestly you can buy a 1700 x4 not very much money and it would also perform a bit better in gaming honestly for 1080p 60 frames per second gaming available xfurbish.
