in this video we'll be taking these and turning it into 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 seller 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 and 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 old friend sorry for 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 endeavor
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 init 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 ebay and this actually brings me to the build portion of this video
[Music] 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 to 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 a video on YouTube of
someone mounting them in this case so that's why I actually chose them because there's not much
clearance and according to the video 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 backplate 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 yeah so I'm gonna see 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
[Music] 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 and we're
gonna see 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
[Music] 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 [Music]
now before we get any further into this video I think it's an actual good time to mention the
specs of this pc behind me here now the cpus are two intel xeon x 56 75 six core cpus 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 video are cooler master
hyper 212 Black Edition Evos 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 [Music] [Applause]
[Music] [Music]
now 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 this thing is a beast even with modern
triple-a titles and I've been editing this video on it and it performs pretty well not
amazingly but it performs decently now a brief mention of one of the biggest issues for me when
it comes to productivity with this PC is the fact that it doesn't have USB 3 so it means
transferring files from an external hard drive or an SD card takes really long now the final
productivity benchmark I ran with this PC is a sis's real bench which is a really well balanced
productivity benchmark and it got a hundred and twenty 1991 which compared to the hundred
and forty five thousand four hundred and twenty eight of a PC that uses an AMD 2700 X and a gtx
980 and it isn't amazing and here is the thermal performance of the two cooler master hyper 212
on the Zeon's in conclusion for 612 US dollars I think this PC is a pretty good purchase and
because you can get the gaming performance at 1080p that you can get from this thing I kind
of think it's worth it and that brings me to the end of the video now I have an Instagram
and a Twitter account so go and follow those if you want to if you enjoyed this video do like
and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and until next one boy [Music] [Applause]
[Music]