The Benefits and Considerations of Building with HPZ Workstation Components

When it comes to building a gaming PC, one popular option is using components from HPZ workstation systems. One such system, the Z440, offers a great balance between performance and price. In this article, we'll explore some of the benefits and considerations of using HPZ workstation components in your build.

Building with Clean Boot Capability

One of the most significant advantages of using HPZ workstation components is their clean boot capability. This feature allows you to quickly restore your system to its factory settings, which can be especially useful when troubleshooting issues or upgrading individual components. However, this feature requires some setup and configuration, as we'll see later in the article.

The Importance of USB 3.0 Headers

When building with HPZ workstation components, it's essential to consider the USB 3.0 headers on your motherboard. In our build, we encountered an issue where the computer did not recognize that the USB 3.0 header was plugged in. This problem was resolved when we switched to a different USB port, and we recommend doing the same if you're experiencing similar issues. The Z440 has several front USB 3.0 connectors, but they may be broken or defective, which can prevent clean booting.

Customizing Your Build

One of the most exciting aspects of building with HPZ workstation components is customizing your system to meet your specific needs and budget. In our build, we opted for RGB lighting, which adds a unique touch to your system's appearance. However, this feature does come at an additional cost. If you're looking to save money, consider skipping the RGB lighting or opting for a different case that includes it.

Balancing Performance and Price

When building with HPZ workstation components, it's essential to balance performance and price. Our build started at around $400 but could have been brought down to $300 by making some compromises. Consider cutting storage, reducing the number of RAM sticks, or opting for a different case that reduces costs.

The Power of Upgrades

One of the most significant advantages of building with HPZ workstation components is their upgrade path. The Z440 supports a wide range of CPUs, including the Intel E5 1650 V4 and E5 1620 V4. By upgrading your CPU, you can improve performance without breaking the bank. However, be aware that more powerful CPUs may require additional cooling solutions.

Exploring CPU Performance

Recently, Craft Computing's Jeff explored the performance of the Z440 with higher-core-count processors from AMD. The results were surprising, and we recommend checking out his video for a deeper dive into this topic.

Conclusion

Building with HPZ workstation components offers many benefits, including clean boot capability, upgrade paths, and affordable prices. However, it also requires careful consideration and customization to meet your specific needs and budget. By weighing the pros and cons of each component and making informed decisions, you can create a gaming PC that meets your performance and aesthetic requirements.

Recommendations

* For those looking for a more affordable option, consider building with the E5 1650 V4 instead of the E5 1650 V4.

* If you're interested in exploring CPU performance with the Z440, check out Craft Computing's video on this topic.

* Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell for more gaming PC build guides and tutorials.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis computer has six cores 12 threads 32 gigs of RAM and can play games on high settings at high FPS and I built it for under 400 I'm going to show you how one thing about cheap server Ram is that it is boring looking so if it mattered to you and you wanted to Bling stuff up a little bit you could always get some of these These are from easy DIY Fab and basically you stick your RAM inside of it and it makes it RGB capable which uh well you're gonna have to deal with a little extra wiring mess but that's RGB so let's install one basically you just take them apart put the EVA foam in there and then stick the ram in the bottom but I'm still getting that situated here and then it's like this right and then you put the next piece of foam along the top stick that and on the top and then just put the screws in budget gaming computers in 2023 are still a thing and so are they with xeons and I'm going to show you how to put one of these together for under 300 a short while back we did a video where we built a under 300 gaming PC out of an HP z440 workstation and that gave me the idea I've done it before with the z420s and the Z400 can I put one in a regular computer case can we make viable gaming machines out of this old workstation and server hardware and the answer is yes so that said I sought out all the parts I needed for this build and here they are first and most important is the hpz440 motherboard now you can save a lot of money by not necessarily having to buy the entire computer because this is the core of what we need the motherboard and the CPU speaking of the CPU I got a Xeon E5 1650 V4 which otherwise may be known as the i7 6800k I believe it is it's a six core 12 third CPU and can go up to four gigahertz and 3.6 on all six cores which is really what you need if you're going to be going backwards in Generations like this one which is fifth generation core architecture then you want to have all the benefit that you can from frequencies a lot of time with these CPUs and the choices that you get you get a lot of cores but you don't get the greatest of frequencies and that will affect your gaming performance so I wanted to give this the best leg up for gaming that we could do on the budget that we had the CPU was about 40 bucks and the motherboard was 50 bucks what a deal all on eBay the best thing about used server parts and workstation parts on eBay is you can some sometimes you can get that stuff super cheap we have four Ram modules here each one is eight gigabytes we have 32 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 ECC server memory and I think I paid around 40 bucks total for all of that such an awesome deal an important thing to remember with adapting these systems is a lot of times you're going to to need some adapters for the power supply this 15 adapter kit will let me connect a regular ATX power supply to this system so that I could use it with like I said any regular power supply normally the z440s use their own pinouts their own power supplies and they're big heavy and won't fit in a normal case this bypasses that issue then to round things out I reached out to Zalman to request some of their budget gear that I think would go great in this system and so we have the Optima cmps 10x cooler here this is four heat pipes so kind of like a hyper 212 but the cool thing about this one is it's using a 135 millimeter fan so a little bit bigger of us of a fan on the CPU is going to result in a little bit better performance than your average 4 heat pack cooler so that's cool this one is all black though and I believe these go for 30-ish dollars but the all-black one is great and all in this case we're going to be using this one the CNT the cnps 10x I'm man the names are long Optima 2 black RGB now the downside of this one it's a little bit smaller it's not going to perform as good as the black but it does have RGB unfortunately they're going to be discontinuing this model so if you're interested in getting one of these coolers go for this one it's going to do better and maybe just throw an RGB fan on it then to power everything is almond sent over the gigamax 600 watt 80 plus bronze power supply now I didn't think too much of Zalman as a power supply brand cases fans coolers sure but power supplies when I'm searching for Budget power supplies I don't usually come across this brand so it interested me in my communication with them they said that their sis don't report a lot of failures with this one this seems to be a very reliable power supply according to their sources I have I have only their word to go by so I'm going to go ahead and hopefully trust that that is good information and we're going to be throwing this in the system speaking of throwing it into a system where rather into a case I have this the Zolman I3 Neo black cool thing about this is it comes with RGB fans a bunch of them so one case one price all lit up all pretty about 75 down to 65 bucks on sale depending on when you look at it pretty good value in that case but we're gonna see how it all looks let's get to the build oh and I almost forgot the graphics card that's going into this system the venerable always super awesome budget friendly RX 580 8 gigabyte cool thing about these you can find them all over eBay now for under 100 bucks same thing with like the GTX 1060 if you wanted to go in video which would be very similar performance on a budget and a 1080p these are still killer I can't forget storage on this system we're going to be going with the 512 gig SATA SSD and a one terabyte hard drive for additional storage and games the one downside to these systems versus modern systems is that they don't really support m.2 and vme ssds and yeah in Linus's video on the hpz420 the predecessor to the base of this system he used those sort of work around method to boot off of an nvme SSD that was on a pcie adapter we're not going to do any of that a SAT SSD is fast enough for gaming usage and light workload use I could say too so let's just go ahead and throw those in foreign ers thanks something I actually really liked for this is a budget case is the fact that it comes with a swing out hinged door and it has pretty strong magnet too so you don't have to be afraid that it's going to open randomly if you're moving it around or anything like that a lot of budget cases with tempered glass side panels have the four screws so the fact that this is starting to make its way down to more budget cases there's a plus in my book anyways though uh let's get the motherboard in here yeah so generally when it comes to these Swing Out cases though they just lift out just like that glad that they kept that standard so the cool thing about the z440 motherboards is they mostly conform to ATX standards so I should just be able to drop this in assuming that I've lined up all the mounts so if you're doing anything like this make sure these holes line up with the ATX mounts in the case now one of the reasons that I absolutely love socket 2011 and the subsequent socket 2066 Intel high-end platform stuff like this mounting a CPU Cooler to it is the easiest thing ever you just find the right screws that screw to the socket on the front of it and then the bracket that goes on the cooler goes right to it no back plates to fiddle with no weird Hardware it literally just basically screws to the socket Intel definitely could have learned a thing or two by taking this own socket design and applying Intel j1700 and then nobody would have had batted an eye or had any problems with the weird issues that they had for the CPU bending weird and not seating fully in causing them to run hot and all that stuff if they just done it like they did on 2011 and 2066 everything would be great so after getting the brackets mounted for the socket now it's just a matter of dropping on there with the right screws and tightening it down and don't forget the thermal paste always go in with the uh the standard mx4 there we go adapting a motherboard like this into a case like this is going to introduce issues a lot of them are press F1 to boot errors at least that they were in the past on this motherboard it's press enter to boot what's happening is the motherboard wants to detect that certain things are connected in order to cleanly boot as in you hit restart computer restarts goes right back to Windows or you hit the power button it turns on goes right to Windows if you don't have those things plugged in it's going to stop so if you're applying updates or waiting for a reboot the computer is literally waiting for you to press a button which some people may not mind but it's not really conducive to like traditional computer usage or easy computer usage so the few things that you have to do on this in order to bypass those things is in the Bios you turn off the uh the front audio function of it so it's whatever you won't have a front audio jack not a big deal but you may also be able to trick it by jumping a couple of pins one of the other things I want to show you right now is is that you plug in a USB 3.0 header a normal one this normal blue one like you see right here and that will trick it into thinking USB 3.0 front panel is connected technically it is but the way that this motherboard works is it wants that connected it wants to know that that's connected so literally just connect it like you would like you're normally building a PC last last one you do is plugging in a pwm fan into the header on the back it's that's labeled rear fans and I'm going to be installing fans in the top here to plug into that in order to accomplish that one so it's all very straightforward box okay so like I mentioned I just plugged in the front HD audio connector but there's two pins sticking out off to the side that's not normal but in order to trick the system just put a jumper over those two pins or disable it and bios one or the other I'm just going to go ahead and Bridge those two pins together and that'll get rid of the air for me one of these you little header to put on there I thought this motherboard was semi-modular this looks like it's not modular at all so as I mentioned one of the tricks that you need to do for this motherboard is install pwm fan to the pwm header on the rear chassis fan connector well I have this one fan and I'm going to put this in the back in this position here which actually I think is going to be beneficial to the case airflow because a lot of times when you have cases like this people put the two fans in the top but then the fan on the cooler is an intake fan so it's fighting the exhaust fan above it to breathe air through it whereas if you just put the one fan back here then you have both of these two pulling air through this one hopefully it's not really like going from this opening just right back out to the exhaust but this is at least going to be a little bit better than having the two up there and this one directly fighting for breath now when it comes to doing these kinds of transplants a lot of people wonder how am I going to connect my front panel buttons like the LED and all that stuff well guess what I don't deal with any of that I literally just connect the power switch one there are two pins if you're wanting to do the same thing with the z440 look in the description below I'm going to leave a description and a link with photos to show where to plug some of this stuff in and that should help you guys out if you wanted to try to replicate something like this and when you reach this point in a computer build it's time to do some cable management get your fans plugged in get your power plugged in route your cables tighten it up we're almost on the home stretch and it's okay if you just jam it all in there but we're I'm going to try to do a little bit I'm just going to jam it in there don't lie to the people and now that we've reached the end pretty much before we power the system on the GPU goes in never make the mistake of putting the GPU in at the beginning or the middle it goes last I popped out the wrong ones and always make sure to pop out the correct Breakaway i o plates mistakes happen forearms that's what he meant one major downside to doing something like this is you don't really get an i o Shield so this is how the back panel is going to look like something to be aware of not that big a deal for being honest but time to fire it up Moment of Truth oh you love to see it foreign foreign now if you're having a problem with USB 3.0 header or you don't have one that's going to be a problem for getting a clean boot though I did run into an issue where this computer did not recognize that the USB 3.0 header was plugged in let me show you right now it's plugged into USB 2.0 right but then if I plug it into the front USB 3.0 connector nothing and so if this is the case with with whatever you have going on if your front USB uh connection front USB 3.0 connection is broken or otherwise defective you won't be able to get the clean boot most of the time that won't be the case so most of the time that means you'll be in good shape the total that this ended up coming out to in its configuration ended up being closer to 400 but there are obviously uh compromises that you can make in order to bring that price down to 300 what I talked about in my original video featuring an hpz 440 custom build or gaming build rather uh we'll go more into that and I'll link that video right up here and at the end of this video and down the description below but RGB does cost a little extra had you not rgb'd not spend the extra 40 bucks in the RGB Ram heatsinks probably gone with a cheaper case this one is currently 75 when I was looking at it it was 65 but there's plenty of 50-ish dollar cases out there um had I even gone with the CPU that this motherboard came with because this did come with its with the CPU when I bought it 50 motherboard came with the Xeon E5 1620 V4 which is a Broadwell 4 core eight thread CPU and that actually probably would have been okay to play the majority of games not having to spend an extra 40 bucks on the E5 1650 V4 that I ended up putting in there so there are ways to cut a little bit here and there depending on you know where you're at in terms of like you can cut storage a little bit if you wanted you can cut on the RGB you can cut on the case a little bit you can really bring that price down to 300 ish like where this really could shine but at the same time when you're building a computer you want it to look as cool as it's going to perform and I'm pretty sure this fits the bill when Linus finally covered hpz workstation builds in his cheapest computer build videos the 69 dollar one and the 420 one based off the z420 which is which are systems that I've played around with on this channel in the past it really lit a fire under me to try to get the more the newer z440 which is up to Broadwell base which is somewhat more relevant than Ivy bridge and Sandy Bridge with the z420 is to try to get it into assist into a build like this because I was able to do that in the past I really like being able to do that I thought I couldn't do it turns out that I can and it's actually very easy and anybody can secondhand workstation and workstation Parts like this can be such an awesome value for it used gaming price of performance so it goes to say that there there is an upgrade path for this still you can go with higher core count CPUs you will lose a little bit of frequency you can go with a lot more RAM but one of the tricks to getting this to clean boot is also only used four sticks of ram if you use more than that you'll get an error when you boot up stick to four sticks 32 gigs should be most plenty for most people especially for just gaming 16 gigs even is an option but because of that upgrade ability of this entire platform craft Computing Jeff over there awesome awesome guy has a video on the hpz440s where he explores how these fare with the higher core count processors against more modern CPUs like that from AMD on their more current ryzing systems and the results are very surprising so while this E5 1650 V4 at 1080p does great if you wanted to see what CPUs what different CPUs do in terms of this versus modern ryzen and stuff like that check out Jess video he tested 1080 1440 and 4K all the information that you could want is here and there make sure you check it all out if you like this video you know what to do hit that subscribe button and that Bell so you don't miss a single upload also as stream to Twitch at twitch.tv Coalition Chris every Friday at 8pm Pacific so feel free to stop by drop a follow let's talk some hpz workstation gaming or whatever Tech q a that you'd like to stop in and talk about if you found this video informative educational entertaining or anything like that make sure you hit that like button and then subscribe and we'll see in the next video on the next stream have a good one everybodythis computer has six cores 12 threads 32 gigs of RAM and can play games on high settings at high FPS and I built it for under 400 I'm going to show you how one thing about cheap server Ram is that it is boring looking so if it mattered to you and you wanted to Bling stuff up a little bit you could always get some of these These are from easy DIY Fab and basically you stick your RAM inside of it and it makes it RGB capable which uh well you're gonna have to deal with a little extra wiring mess but that's RGB so let's install one basically you just take them apart put the EVA foam in there and then stick the ram in the bottom but I'm still getting that situated here and then it's like this right and then you put the next piece of foam along the top stick that and on the top and then just put the screws in budget gaming computers in 2023 are still a thing and so are they with xeons and I'm going to show you how to put one of these together for under 300 a short while back we did a video where we built a under 300 gaming PC out of an HP z440 workstation and that gave me the idea I've done it before with the z420s and the Z400 can I put one in a regular computer case can we make viable gaming machines out of this old workstation and server hardware and the answer is yes so that said I sought out all the parts I needed for this build and here they are first and most important is the hpz440 motherboard now you can save a lot of money by not necessarily having to buy the entire computer because this is the core of what we need the motherboard and the CPU speaking of the CPU I got a Xeon E5 1650 V4 which otherwise may be known as the i7 6800k I believe it is it's a six core 12 third CPU and can go up to four gigahertz and 3.6 on all six cores which is really what you need if you're going to be going backwards in Generations like this one which is fifth generation core architecture then you want to have all the benefit that you can from frequencies a lot of time with these CPUs and the choices that you get you get a lot of cores but you don't get the greatest of frequencies and that will affect your gaming performance so I wanted to give this the best leg up for gaming that we could do on the budget that we had the CPU was about 40 bucks and the motherboard was 50 bucks what a deal all on eBay the best thing about used server parts and workstation parts on eBay is you can some sometimes you can get that stuff super cheap we have four Ram modules here each one is eight gigabytes we have 32 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 ECC server memory and I think I paid around 40 bucks total for all of that such an awesome deal an important thing to remember with adapting these systems is a lot of times you're going to to need some adapters for the power supply this 15 adapter kit will let me connect a regular ATX power supply to this system so that I could use it with like I said any regular power supply normally the z440s use their own pinouts their own power supplies and they're big heavy and won't fit in a normal case this bypasses that issue then to round things out I reached out to Zalman to request some of their budget gear that I think would go great in this system and so we have the Optima cmps 10x cooler here this is four heat pipes so kind of like a hyper 212 but the cool thing about this one is it's using a 135 millimeter fan so a little bit bigger of us of a fan on the CPU is going to result in a little bit better performance than your average 4 heat pack cooler so that's cool this one is all black though and I believe these go for 30-ish dollars but the all-black one is great and all in this case we're going to be using this one the CNT the cnps 10x I'm man the names are long Optima 2 black RGB now the downside of this one it's a little bit smaller it's not going to perform as good as the black but it does have RGB unfortunately they're going to be discontinuing this model so if you're interested in getting one of these coolers go for this one it's going to do better and maybe just throw an RGB fan on it then to power everything is almond sent over the gigamax 600 watt 80 plus bronze power supply now I didn't think too much of Zalman as a power supply brand cases fans coolers sure but power supplies when I'm searching for Budget power supplies I don't usually come across this brand so it interested me in my communication with them they said that their sis don't report a lot of failures with this one this seems to be a very reliable power supply according to their sources I have I have only their word to go by so I'm going to go ahead and hopefully trust that that is good information and we're going to be throwing this in the system speaking of throwing it into a system where rather into a case I have this the Zolman I3 Neo black cool thing about this is it comes with RGB fans a bunch of them so one case one price all lit up all pretty about 75 down to 65 bucks on sale depending on when you look at it pretty good value in that case but we're gonna see how it all looks let's get to the build oh and I almost forgot the graphics card that's going into this system the venerable always super awesome budget friendly RX 580 8 gigabyte cool thing about these you can find them all over eBay now for under 100 bucks same thing with like the GTX 1060 if you wanted to go in video which would be very similar performance on a budget and a 1080p these are still killer I can't forget storage on this system we're going to be going with the 512 gig SATA SSD and a one terabyte hard drive for additional storage and games the one downside to these systems versus modern systems is that they don't really support m.2 and vme ssds and yeah in Linus's video on the hpz420 the predecessor to the base of this system he used those sort of work around method to boot off of an nvme SSD that was on a pcie adapter we're not going to do any of that a SAT SSD is fast enough for gaming usage and light workload use I could say too so let's just go ahead and throw those in foreign ers thanks something I actually really liked for this is a budget case is the fact that it comes with a swing out hinged door and it has pretty strong magnet too so you don't have to be afraid that it's going to open randomly if you're moving it around or anything like that a lot of budget cases with tempered glass side panels have the four screws so the fact that this is starting to make its way down to more budget cases there's a plus in my book anyways though uh let's get the motherboard in here yeah so generally when it comes to these Swing Out cases though they just lift out just like that glad that they kept that standard so the cool thing about the z440 motherboards is they mostly conform to ATX standards so I should just be able to drop this in assuming that I've lined up all the mounts so if you're doing anything like this make sure these holes line up with the ATX mounts in the case now one of the reasons that I absolutely love socket 2011 and the subsequent socket 2066 Intel high-end platform stuff like this mounting a CPU Cooler to it is the easiest thing ever you just find the right screws that screw to the socket on the front of it and then the bracket that goes on the cooler goes right to it no back plates to fiddle with no weird Hardware it literally just basically screws to the socket Intel definitely could have learned a thing or two by taking this own socket design and applying Intel j1700 and then nobody would have had batted an eye or had any problems with the weird issues that they had for the CPU bending weird and not seating fully in causing them to run hot and all that stuff if they just done it like they did on 2011 and 2066 everything would be great so after getting the brackets mounted for the socket now it's just a matter of dropping on there with the right screws and tightening it down and don't forget the thermal paste always go in with the uh the standard mx4 there we go adapting a motherboard like this into a case like this is going to introduce issues a lot of them are press F1 to boot errors at least that they were in the past on this motherboard it's press enter to boot what's happening is the motherboard wants to detect that certain things are connected in order to cleanly boot as in you hit restart computer restarts goes right back to Windows or you hit the power button it turns on goes right to Windows if you don't have those things plugged in it's going to stop so if you're applying updates or waiting for a reboot the computer is literally waiting for you to press a button which some people may not mind but it's not really conducive to like traditional computer usage or easy computer usage so the few things that you have to do on this in order to bypass those things is in the Bios you turn off the uh the front audio function of it so it's whatever you won't have a front audio jack not a big deal but you may also be able to trick it by jumping a couple of pins one of the other things I want to show you right now is is that you plug in a USB 3.0 header a normal one this normal blue one like you see right here and that will trick it into thinking USB 3.0 front panel is connected technically it is but the way that this motherboard works is it wants that connected it wants to know that that's connected so literally just connect it like you would like you're normally building a PC last last one you do is plugging in a pwm fan into the header on the back it's that's labeled rear fans and I'm going to be installing fans in the top here to plug into that in order to accomplish that one so it's all very straightforward box okay so like I mentioned I just plugged in the front HD audio connector but there's two pins sticking out off to the side that's not normal but in order to trick the system just put a jumper over those two pins or disable it and bios one or the other I'm just going to go ahead and Bridge those two pins together and that'll get rid of the air for me one of these you little header to put on there I thought this motherboard was semi-modular this looks like it's not modular at all so as I mentioned one of the tricks that you need to do for this motherboard is install pwm fan to the pwm header on the rear chassis fan connector well I have this one fan and I'm going to put this in the back in this position here which actually I think is going to be beneficial to the case airflow because a lot of times when you have cases like this people put the two fans in the top but then the fan on the cooler is an intake fan so it's fighting the exhaust fan above it to breathe air through it whereas if you just put the one fan back here then you have both of these two pulling air through this one hopefully it's not really like going from this opening just right back out to the exhaust but this is at least going to be a little bit better than having the two up there and this one directly fighting for breath now when it comes to doing these kinds of transplants a lot of people wonder how am I going to connect my front panel buttons like the LED and all that stuff well guess what I don't deal with any of that I literally just connect the power switch one there are two pins if you're wanting to do the same thing with the z440 look in the description below I'm going to leave a description and a link with photos to show where to plug some of this stuff in and that should help you guys out if you wanted to try to replicate something like this and when you reach this point in a computer build it's time to do some cable management get your fans plugged in get your power plugged in route your cables tighten it up we're almost on the home stretch and it's okay if you just jam it all in there but we're I'm going to try to do a little bit I'm just going to jam it in there don't lie to the people and now that we've reached the end pretty much before we power the system on the GPU goes in never make the mistake of putting the GPU in at the beginning or the middle it goes last I popped out the wrong ones and always make sure to pop out the correct Breakaway i o plates mistakes happen forearms that's what he meant one major downside to doing something like this is you don't really get an i o Shield so this is how the back panel is going to look like something to be aware of not that big a deal for being honest but time to fire it up Moment of Truth oh you love to see it foreign foreign now if you're having a problem with USB 3.0 header or you don't have one that's going to be a problem for getting a clean boot though I did run into an issue where this computer did not recognize that the USB 3.0 header was plugged in let me show you right now it's plugged into USB 2.0 right but then if I plug it into the front USB 3.0 connector nothing and so if this is the case with with whatever you have going on if your front USB uh connection front USB 3.0 connection is broken or otherwise defective you won't be able to get the clean boot most of the time that won't be the case so most of the time that means you'll be in good shape the total that this ended up coming out to in its configuration ended up being closer to 400 but there are obviously uh compromises that you can make in order to bring that price down to 300 what I talked about in my original video featuring an hpz 440 custom build or gaming build rather uh we'll go more into that and I'll link that video right up here and at the end of this video and down the description below but RGB does cost a little extra had you not rgb'd not spend the extra 40 bucks in the RGB Ram heatsinks probably gone with a cheaper case this one is currently 75 when I was looking at it it was 65 but there's plenty of 50-ish dollar cases out there um had I even gone with the CPU that this motherboard came with because this did come with its with the CPU when I bought it 50 motherboard came with the Xeon E5 1620 V4 which is a Broadwell 4 core eight thread CPU and that actually probably would have been okay to play the majority of games not having to spend an extra 40 bucks on the E5 1650 V4 that I ended up putting in there so there are ways to cut a little bit here and there depending on you know where you're at in terms of like you can cut storage a little bit if you wanted you can cut on the RGB you can cut on the case a little bit you can really bring that price down to 300 ish like where this really could shine but at the same time when you're building a computer you want it to look as cool as it's going to perform and I'm pretty sure this fits the bill when Linus finally covered hpz workstation builds in his cheapest computer build videos the 69 dollar one and the 420 one based off the z420 which is which are systems that I've played around with on this channel in the past it really lit a fire under me to try to get the more the newer z440 which is up to Broadwell base which is somewhat more relevant than Ivy bridge and Sandy Bridge with the z420 is to try to get it into assist into a build like this because I was able to do that in the past I really like being able to do that I thought I couldn't do it turns out that I can and it's actually very easy and anybody can secondhand workstation and workstation Parts like this can be such an awesome value for it used gaming price of performance so it goes to say that there there is an upgrade path for this still you can go with higher core count CPUs you will lose a little bit of frequency you can go with a lot more RAM but one of the tricks to getting this to clean boot is also only used four sticks of ram if you use more than that you'll get an error when you boot up stick to four sticks 32 gigs should be most plenty for most people especially for just gaming 16 gigs even is an option but because of that upgrade ability of this entire platform craft Computing Jeff over there awesome awesome guy has a video on the hpz440s where he explores how these fare with the higher core count processors against more modern CPUs like that from AMD on their more current ryzing systems and the results are very surprising so while this E5 1650 V4 at 1080p does great if you wanted to see what CPUs what different CPUs do in terms of this versus modern ryzen and stuff like that check out Jess video he tested 1080 1440 and 4K all the information that you could want is here and there make sure you check it all out if you like this video you know what to do hit that subscribe button and that Bell so you don't miss a single upload also as stream to Twitch at twitch.tv Coalition Chris every Friday at 8pm Pacific so feel free to stop by drop a follow let's talk some hpz workstation gaming or whatever Tech q a that you'd like to stop in and talk about if you found this video informative educational entertaining or anything like that make sure you hit that like button and then subscribe and we'll see in the next video on the next stream have a good one everybody\n"