http://www.hp.com/canada/products/landing/workstations/files/13278_na.pdf
It has an upgraded video card, solid state drives, and 96GB of RAM. I can boot either Mint Linux or
Win7 Pro. I maybe have $600 into it. The way it's configured, it would have been well over $10,000
in 2010-2011. It was the most expensive Windows workstation. Only Mac Pros (the ones they used
to make the Hollywood movies) were priced higher. I put in a graphics card that my old boss, who
games, had thrown in a box when he upgraded gave me for free. They sell for somewhere between
$100-$150 used these days, but the video is by far the weakest component.
I'm not bragging about my computer. It's not state of the art, and wouldn't be worth a shit for
gaming by today's standards, and I wasted money on putting in 96GB of RAM, when I had intended
to only put in 60 (I accidentally duplicate ordered). A $350-$400 graphics card would improve it
greatly, as would a kickass sound card and a BluRay drive. The thing is this. For about $1000, you
can buy and upgrade one of these (normal users who don't have 100+ browser tabs open don't need
more than 24GB of RAM), and unless you do graphics intense things, you'll have a better
workstation/desktop PC than you could buy new for twice the price. DDR4 isn't that much faster
than DDR3, except in graphics cards. It does lack a M.2 SSD slot, so it won't ever boot super fast,
but how often does one really need to reboot a desktop?
These machines were originally sold with Vista Pro, with downgrade rights to XP Pro, but 7 Pro is the
sweet spot. We boot Linux because my wife uses it for banking, and Win7 supposedly has
vulnerabilities, and I haven't figured out how to dual boot w/o removing the Windows SSD, as no
matter which slot I use, it will default to booting Windows. I think that all I would need is a USB thumb
drive configured to give me a boot choice, and there's a guy at work who could probably set me up
with that. There's only so much time, and I just spent some of it drinking beer and writing this post.
--Bryan