@@HardwareHaven you know bro, about 10 years ago, 4GB of RAM and a very weak cpu like an intel pentium is already good enough for everyday use, but for today's modern day workloads you need a much more powerful CPU and 8GB of RAM or more
Back in the day I was a little upset when Lenovo bought IBM's PC Business, as I thought IBM was doing a good job offering Athlon based CPU's as a competitor to many of the Intel pc manufacturers out there. I was hoping consumers wouldn't lose a good alternative, but complimentary product manufacturer in IBM. 17 yrs later I think Lenovo buying that arm of IBM was a great option! Glad to see some of their old hardware getting some use, as it didn't seem as proprietary as some of the other systems I've seen, at least from my view. :)
Some of the lenovo stuff has been very "open", but it seems like more recently it's been a bit more proprietary. I also hate their lack of documentation haha
@@HardwareHavenneed advice I'm looking at a 8 core xeon workstation Lenovo p520 it has dual 6 plus 2 pin which is incredibly rare right. Do you know of any other workstations that have dual 6 plus 2 pin.
Great deal, great video. So it is a 1151 socket. Good thing that XEON has integrated graphics and the SSE4.1/ 4.2 set of instructions. I think that PC can be used for virtually anything. Greetings from Panama 🇵🇦
reusing / refurbishind old or "old" workstations from lenovo is always an amazing thing :D i myself decided to rebuild a P330 Tiny myself - gave it i5-8400T and RX 6400 (originaly it came with i5-9400T and Quadro P620) amazing machine, even with RX being forced to run in PCIE 3.0 mode, it is still hell of a unit! just have to find someone who can make me a 3d printed io shield for GPU since you need to use special lenovo one for that :/
@@HardwareHaven Well, at the moment for a single slot true LP GPU, you only got 3 options. RX 6400, Quadro T600 and Quadro T1000 If you got PCIE 4.0 system, then RX 6400 currently is only proper option - unless you really need encoders / decoders OR uses more than 2 screens... In that case just go for Quadro I would really Nvidia to release a new proper single slot card that is not "workstation only" related and something that is not GTX (more like GT) 1630 :/ Lets hope Intel LP cards will be released
@@Karti200 there's a guy who managed to cram a working rtx a2000 into one of these "tiny" PCs. He designed his own 1 slot cooler and it somehow doesn't throttle! I've tried to do something similar with a slightly bigger heatsink but with the weird 2 screw design I can't seem to get the mounting pressure right.
Dude those RX6400's pack a punch for it size, able to play games on 4790 at 1440p hitting upwards of 60 fps, with lowered graphics quality of course. Its not a good encoder card due to the lack of one, I do recommend these if you wanna game on the cheap.
Love these kind of builds. I have a hp z420 work station I got last year and upgraded the ram to 32gb and threw a ssd and gtx1060 in it and it’s amazing. 6 core Xeon 1650. Figure I’ll upgrade to another retired work station eventually since they make such good gaming rigs!
Intel XTU can OC that CPU. I have z420 with 1650v2 and it does 3.9ghz all-core turbo. Z440 might be the next upgrade, if you find the whole machine for $100. It moves to DDR4, I put a cheap i7 K in one, or use 16xx processors for overclock.
@@milescarter7803 will have to look into the oc for fun. It doesn’t bottle neck anything I do as is. Actually waiting on my steam deck to come in and I’m going to turn it into a desktop gaming system. It’s very similar score to the Xeon but 1/10th the power consumption:
That's good hardware, HP does put out good stuff from my experience and xeons are generally all purpose kick ass CPU's. That 1060 is a good GPU, hopefully you got the 6 gig version?... I have the 6 gig version and it does great on late titles. I don't run 4k so it'll do just fine for a long time yet.
Nice video. I recently repurposed a friend's old Lenovo IdeaCentre with an i5 6400. I ran into a dying hdd and psu as well. Also accidentally broke the mount for the cpu cooler so I used another mobo. Ended up not using most components and gave it a refresh. The thermal paste was completely dried out. For S&Gs, I tested an RX 6600 for gaming. In some instances it was ok but the CPU was obviously bottlenecked pretty hard in others creating constant microstutters. It does fine with OBS recordings with a RX550.
I have 2 x Lenovo p310 workstations that I got for free from work when they upgraded to newer kit. They both have an i7 6700k with 32GB RAM. I run Microsoft Server 2019 Hyper-V on both, using them to run my Virtual Machines at home. Had them for about 18 months so far, no issues with them at all.
Just got one of these (without drives or gpu, but with an intel nic card) for $95 delivered. I just moved across the country, and im excited to replace and consolidate my homelab with this machine, possibly using proxmox to virtualize my router, NFS, and container services.
At 4:00, the reason why it doesn't have standard SATA power connectors nor your regular ATX connectors because this is an early implementation of ATX12VO before that even existed. That PSU only supplies 12V, and that's one of the reasons why it has less pins (the motherboard itself will deal with the DC to DC conversion) and why it was able to get an 80 Plus Platinum rating for a 400w PSU. It's just ridiculously efficient!
I bought a Lenovo D30 a couple of months ago for 70ukp. It had a pair of Xeon E5-2609's and 16Gb or RAM. I upgraded it to a pair of E5-2667 v2s and 128Gb of RAM and it is pretty powerful considering the CPUs cost me 30ukp and the RAM was 50ukp, so for 150ukp I have a hell of a system.
Great video! I LOVE restoring and re-using "old" office machines like this. I recently picked up an older Dell AiO Optiplex for ~$80 from a local university, and it runs incredibly well for a 3rd gen i5 machine. It's so satisfying to work with older hardware since there's usually always something you can use it for even today. Much better than letting these machines sit in a landfill!
The inside of that system looks very similar to the ThinkServer TS140 that I still use as my daily driver machine today. Paid $400 for it in 2015 and gave it a RAM upgrade and an SSD and it still functions very well today.
I would strongly reccomend going for a used dual cpu Lenovo workstation like the P700 (dual cpu model from that series) or older D30. Usually come with ECC ram, can have much more horses, more standardized ports, and can be racked with a rail kit (afaik). The D30 can be had for that price iirc, and the P700 for $300 to $500 depending on what’s in it.
In general I’ve actually been finding lots of good deals on dual Xeon machines from 2012-2015. Full kitted machines from 300 to 500 depending on ram speed cpu type, etc. and you usually get server level reliability
BTW I just wanted to answered your question on why Lenovo uses only 12VO ATX PSUs 1. It is better for the environment as it reduces the copper consumption 2. It gives the Vendor leverage on how the components power source quality 3. It is much easier in the supply management and it makes the QA much easier when you are sourcing power supplies from different suppliers. About the Fan rubber you can use Lenovo support channel to check how to replace the fans , it is very easy you just have to pull these rubber bands out longer till they squeeze out.
I have found these workstations for HALF the price on either amazon or at the goodwill. I bought a workstation for 300 on ebay and saw a few days later the same one for 150 on amazon. Also saw the same one at the goodwill for same price (150) Just some advice. I do the the same stuff.
I am the owner of two Lenovo M58p SFF machines. The thermal paste used in those is horrific. In the case of the second M58p, thermal paste even got in the socket just like your workstation. I know these systems of mine are ancient now being from 2008, but I currently have one of them running a Minecraft server very nicely. When I eventually sort out the local media situation, I'm gonna need a better machine for transcoding video as the GMA X4500 iGPU isn't going to cut it.
I purchased 2 NEW Lenovo TS140 about 8 years ago for $200 each with Xeon quad core CPU and 4gb ram. They still work but I don’t use them anymore. But worked great when I was using them with MS-Windows and UNIX. I used an Nvidia GT-710 or 730 for Dual Boot support. I really liked this little mini-tower computer. Never let me down and was rock solid in reliability. These use to sell for cheap NEW on amazon and eBay.
I have recently got myself a yummy deal off of a clueless guy online, too. I got a Lenovo ThinkStation P500 with a Quadro K2200, 256GB SATA SSD, 500GB HDD (which they thought was corrupted, even though it just didn't have any partition table on it), Xeon E5-1630v3, 650W 80 Platinum PSU, 4x 4GB SK Hynix DDR4 2133MHz ECC RDIMM RAM modules, all that for 100$, after negotiating a discount of about 20$. I have upgraded the CPU, GPU, WiFi adapter, M.2 NVMe adapter and got myself a nice budget gaming desktop for about 150$ (net, after selling the old GPU and stuff).
I remember buying retired office/school PCs for $30 or so a pop years ago. Turned them into decent entry level gaming PCs for my nephews. They’ve upgraded since but they worked great at the time.
@@HardwareHaven You mentioned it clearly in the video, and I understand that completely, having myself a Dell T3500 that is huge but not great for cables. Perhaps you can use the 5"25 bays to mount HDD
Good stuff! I think I prefer the Dell Precision line to this, built much more like a server than a desktop with quick disconnect PSU, tons of fans and airflow channels for the RAM. Still only 2 drive bays for some reason... I got a free T5810 from my place of work, probably slower and way more power hungry than this, it's got a LGA 2011 E5 Xeon 1620 v3, 32GB ECC RAM and a Quadro K2200. Still haven't figured out what to do with it but it's a nice system and they go for around the same amount.
You said you thought that hard drive was failing, however I think your experience was pretty standard for the latest versions of Windows 10 running on a mechanical hard drive. I recently upgraded my dads Windows 7 machine to 10 and had the same experience.
I'm still running on 6th gen Intel from when I bought it new. Still does excellent and, with a decent GPU it has zero issues running the latest games with lower AA on some games. With a M.2 drive and a SSD it even runs windows 11 and updated like it was meant to be. I have no reason to go newer at this point, running 10 and 11 on it with two separate drives why change? I keep my system in good condition and I don't buy cheap stuff so it should easily last another 5 years or more. Looking back at all the PC's I've had upgrading for no reason but for the latest hardware, I could have ran them for years more... I won't make that mistake again. A quality barebones system will last a long time if it hasn't been tortured.
I actually got a system not too long ago with the i7 6700K but no GPU for 130 Euro and it was built by the previous owner so it had a normal power supply and case but also a HDD 😔
I got a Lenovo IdeaCentre K410 working and complete for $20 and, much like you, I also enjoy messing with old PCs. I added a used $50 i7 3770 (originally an i5 3450) and a $1.99 thrifted Asus GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II (BIOS is whitelisted to GeForce 6 series, it originally included a low-profile GT 610). I also added an EVGA 430W PSU I got for free (included with a $6.99 sffpc case I thrifted for another build). So far it's the best (cheapest) second-hand build I've done yet. Getting under the $100 mark for everything was tricky: with the $3 22" Samsung LED FHD monitor (only missing the $2 power supply), $5.99 Razer Black Widow Ultimate 2016 and $3.99 DeathAdder Elite, it actually isn't all that bad to daily for a sub-$100 complete setup.
I’m not crazy about proprietor hardware. (I live very near Dell’s home base and find or get lots of Dell hardware). Since you could sell the GPU and make money back it was worth the price you paid for it. Great video.
Bro, I swear you stole that eBay listing from me… I ended up getting a Lenovo p710 with dual sockets with Xeon e5 2620s and 16 gb of ram. And same graphics card for $300. I am testing it out today!
I recently picked one of these up for work. It is the SFF version and the new job I went in to let me pick a system. It seems to do well and has the firepro card and the same CPU with 32GB of ram. Seems to do all of my network monitoring tasks and drives 4 monitors just fine.
I have bunch of those as well. Also some thin clients, which are essentially 32_64 bit PCs... I use them a lot for pihole, as they intended to be: thin client alike with an old ThinkCenter proxmox. Fun stuff! Great to watch such channel like this!
I just bought and built an old T5810 workstation myself on eBay for $80.82. I needed to add an AMD 8bg FirePro GPU ($60 on eBay) and adapters to boot to m.2 2280 drives ($25). It would have been a better option for you because of the availability of parts, default ram speed for a E5-1630 v4 is 2400. Once you factor in the price of the m.2 hard drive ($45-500gb) I am around the same cost as yours. The Dell T5810 can stock with a 685watt power supply which made it possibly to use the 8gb gpu.
I think this pc is a good deal. i bought an 200$ pc as well not too long ago, but it only came with an i7 860 8gb of ddr3 sdram and a gts 450 paired with an cheap chinese psu aka a bomb and the hard drive that was clapped out as well so this was a pretty good deal if i do say so myself.
found an older Lenovo thinkcentre for $50 ... my NAS had a socket LGA1155 i7 3770 & this Lenovo had a LGA1155 i5 2320 ... so swapped them out & the Lenovo runs like a champ w/16gigs of RAM & an old GT210 a SSD as a boot drive & a 2TB HDD for storage ... perfect work/HTPC
That's not only a Lenovo Disease. My Work Fujitsu Celsius+ died a few Weeks ago. The Technician change at first the Motherboard and like so often it's not the Solution. He tried a new mighty 260 Watt PSU and that was the Solution of the Problem. The Fujitsu used also a 10 Pin Connector to the Motherboard. Power for the Drives comes also from the Motherboard.
the only product i ever bought that was Actually worth it's money , was a SubPac M1 and S2 when the M1 broke it's cable , which was my own fault by misusing it it's basically a subwoofer in your gaming chair or you can wear it like a backpack the drive these things have , no headphone or ''normal'' desktop speaker could come close to what i feel , and you can even give it some more power with an amp , physical amp or software based or even both to really dial it in how ever you like works with everything , even sends throughput of 7.1 to appropriate headphones , just not the mic signal if you need one your eyes and basically your body can get a descent massage from this woofer , which there are also nice rumbling tracks to listen to and relax in to. people are getting ripped of left and right in this world , but this thing was definitely worth the money i paid for it !!
Had one Lenovo tower with Haswell Celeron and 1×4GB DDR3-1333 and pretty much dead HDD together with 22 inch AOC monitor saved from dumpster. After changing the RAM to 2×4GB DDR3-1600 and CPU to Xeon 11265Lv3, together with adding GT1030(which I had already) total cost was about 100 USD. Today I have another Haswell with the same CPU paired with RX560 and it actually can do some games. So CPU-wise the one of yours sounds great. But man, faulty PSU is a pain! AT era of manually switching on and off sure delivers so.e tears of nostalgia thought 😅
I think the real value in machines like this is ECC support at a reasonable price which is great for a nas. If not for that, there are much more performant platforms that draw far less power. The nice thing about both of those facts is that it will keep prices down on these platforms for folks that want to build a cheap nas with ECC ram.
The card regular sells because it is a cheap way to get a media server set up. The cheapest new card is going to be considerably more expensive than that, if you can even find one.
Wrote a long comment, but it disappeared. The TLDR; I very much enjoy your videos, I do a very similar thing but you make it look more interesting. You asked for other budget suggestions, so I propose the Optiplex series. They are everywhere and can be had for ~$100. I have owned three. An SFF I built up for my kid, and two USFF, a 780 and a 9020. The 9020 replaced my 780 as a MC server and I'm presently looking for a useful-to-me use for my 780 (with upgraded ssd & C2D E8600).
It's a good system if you need a graphics card and storage space. For my own needs it would be too big. I run two websites with some computing needs on an HP office PC (£150). It has an i5 9500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB nvme SSD. The best part is just 7W idle power.
Just came across your video since I'm considering buying and doing a home server with one of these. If you still have the old powersupply, at min 10:00 of your video, there is a slightly bulging capacitor at the top right of the frame, next to the transformer. If you change that one, it should be good, but if you're going to do that, I'd suggest changing all caps and that power supply will go for years.
While this is a decent find, I feel like someone should look for something with at least an 8th gen CPU or newer. I got a Dell Optiplex 7060 with an 8700 and 16 gb of ram and a 512 gb sata m.2 ssd for $185. With 8th gen and newer you don't need a dedicated GPU bc intel uhd 630 graphics are good enough for transcoding multiple 4k plex on the fly transcodes simultaneously. The downstairs are limited drive storage and a proprietary form factor motherboard and PSU. However if you have a 3d printer and a Dremel, you can make a few modifications to the case. Personally I plan to just buy a case with lots of drive bays and a new PSU and motherboard. I personally see the PSU and case as a long-term investment though since I can easily reuse them in future builds. Great video btw.
Interesting that a fairly basic Quadro k1200 is still selling for $80 on eBay. Some of the fun workstations to play with, if you can get them at the right price, are the ones with LGA2011-3 and LGA2066 chips (like Lenovo P500, P510, Dell Precision 5810 and 5820).
The power supply problem would have been down to the main big capacitor in the PSU. I used to repair & recertify server and PC powers supplies for Dell & HP etc and those FSP's suffered this a lot.
Im just looking for any motherboard with Intel network card (really lot of MB using Realtek) to run Vmware ESXI hypervizor. And this looking good, hopint, that Intel NET adapter is not just in this P310 but also in P500. And for 200 bucks its a great deal to almost anything on Linux.
That case looks identical to the ThinkServer TS140 I got from a work old hardware giveaway. Same annoyances and fixed it about the same. New PSU and the adapter (although I don't have the problem with the PSU not turning off like you mentioned). The lack of places for 3.5" - mine came with 2 different 5.25" bay converters. The top one has a slim DVD, small fan and adapter for 3.5", the bottom a fan and adapter for 3.5". So it could hold 4x 3.5" but not sure I would ever trust that all running off the motherboard power. :)
Got a TS150 myself recently that is very similar, pretty nice and quiet machine but man updating the BIOS was a pain and having ECC issues in old BIOS versions is embarrasing. Also it's meant to run 4 disks so i don't see any reason not to trust it.
I died inside a little bit after you said the PSU died, as my main computer has the same symptoms and shuts down after 3-4 minutes. Oh well, kinda expected because it is a Corsair HX520w that was probably released in 2012.
I have dell optiplex 7020 i7 4790, 16gigs rams with Quadro K2200, PSU FSP HV 550W. NVMe 512Gb using pcie x16 converter adapter. Old but enough for me 😁.
Liked the video because you included the power draw at the wall on idle and load... This is super efficient really.. I wonder if the evga was as efficient
@@HardwareHaven Btw it's IMPOSSIBLE to purchase this cpu at this price.. incidentally I found out that this is a c236 chipset which is another expensive motherboard to purchase.. main reason I would get it is to put in a e3-1235Lv5 in there (low power 35W + includes a p530 graphics)
I'm currently rocking an amd e-300 desktop motherboard with an radeon hd7770. I know it's a huge mismatch, but i was just interested how it'd handle it
Just don’t make the mistake that I made. Those are fine for SATA SSDs, but I added an HGST Deskstar to the mix and thing idles at 55 degrees. A 5400 rpm 3.5” is what I’d recommend with those adapters.
So this Lenovo p310 is socket 1151 and ddr 4. The xeon you show is socket 1150 and will not fit this board. It will fit the p300 which is also ddr3. I had 2 of these and cannot load Win 7, in that it will not read the win 7 DVD
How about trying PeerTube? It will be much more more fun than another boring NAS. I don't know if it can use hardware encoding, but if so, a graphics card would be very helpful.
Yeah, I didn’t provide enough detail there though. It was quite a bit worse than my other experiences with HDDs in windows, and was also making pretty horrible noises. I’m not sure why I cut that from the video
@@HardwareHaven Yea, Horrible noises kinda makes a difference with spinners, Probably alot scarier with solid state though... Like, "Theres nothing to make noise there, Why is it making noise?"
When buying off of Facebook Marketplace, do you usually have a maximum distance you'll willing to travel and maximum budget? Surely at some point the distance to travel becomes too large to still be worth it. I'd love to see a video on your buying process for some of these videos.
i have a ibm think station compaq i think and my cats have sprayed on it though so it no longer works but it would be cool to take everything out and replace it with modern stuff :D
If you do make a video moving the system into a new case. Is there any chance you would be willing to sell or give me the case, I have a project in mind with an old motherboard. Thank love your videos btw.
I`ve also got a Thinkstation P310 and I think about replacing the PSU by a new ATX PSU (by the help of an adapter). But new PSUs are built different with the fan up or down. How should I place the new PSU without getting problems with the Lenovo's airflow?? If I put the PSU with the fan upwards there's no headroom for fresh air!? And do you reccomend any PSU for this older workstation?
That K1200 alone is a pretty good deal, everything else is... just standard stuff. The interesting old Lenovo workstations' are the 710 or 910, but it's incredibly pricey on ebay for some reason?
When I saw that it came with the Quadro, you scored yourself a pretty good find.
Yeah that definitely made up for some of the cost!
@@HardwareHaven you know bro, about 10 years ago, 4GB of RAM and a very weak cpu like an intel pentium is already good enough for everyday use, but for today's modern day workloads you need a much more powerful CPU and 8GB of RAM or more
Back in the day I was a little upset when Lenovo bought IBM's PC Business, as I thought IBM was doing a good job offering Athlon based CPU's as a competitor to many of the Intel pc manufacturers out there. I was hoping consumers wouldn't lose a good alternative, but complimentary product manufacturer in IBM. 17 yrs later I think Lenovo buying that arm of IBM was a great option! Glad to see some of their old hardware getting some use, as it didn't seem as proprietary as some of the other systems I've seen, at least from my view. :)
Some of the lenovo stuff has been very "open", but it seems like more recently it's been a bit more proprietary. I also hate their lack of documentation haha
@@HardwareHavenneed advice I'm looking at a 8 core xeon workstation Lenovo p520 it has dual 6 plus 2 pin which is incredibly rare right. Do you know of any other workstations that have dual 6 plus 2 pin.
Great deal, great video. So it is a 1151 socket. Good thing that XEON has integrated graphics and the SSE4.1/ 4.2 set of instructions. I think that PC can be used for virtually anything. Greetings from Panama 🇵🇦
reusing / refurbishind old or "old" workstations from lenovo is always an amazing thing :D
i myself decided to rebuild a P330 Tiny myself - gave it i5-8400T and RX 6400 (originaly it came with i5-9400T and Quadro P620)
amazing machine, even with RX being forced to run in PCIE 3.0 mode, it is still hell of a unit!
just have to find someone who can make me a 3d printed io shield for GPU since you need to use special lenovo one for that :/
Nice! I really hope some better lp GPU options become available in the near future for things like this.
@@HardwareHaven Well, at the moment for a single slot true LP GPU, you only got 3 options.
RX 6400, Quadro T600 and Quadro T1000
If you got PCIE 4.0 system, then RX 6400 currently is only proper option - unless you really need encoders / decoders OR uses more than 2 screens... In that case just go for Quadro
I would really Nvidia to release a new proper single slot card that is not "workstation only" related and something that is not GTX (more like GT) 1630 :/
Lets hope Intel LP cards will be released
@@Karti200 there's a guy who managed to cram a working rtx a2000 into one of these "tiny" PCs.
He designed his own 1 slot cooler and it somehow doesn't throttle! I've tried to do something similar with a slightly bigger heatsink but with the weird 2 screw design I can't seem to get the mounting pressure right.
@@Karti200 Why did you swap the i5-9400T with a i5-8400T?
Dude those RX6400's pack a punch for it size, able to play games on 4790 at 1440p hitting upwards of 60 fps, with lowered graphics quality of course.
Its not a good encoder card due to the lack of one, I do recommend these if you wanna game on the cheap.
Love these kind of builds. I have a hp z420 work station I got last year and upgraded the ram to 32gb and threw a ssd and gtx1060 in it and it’s amazing. 6 core Xeon 1650. Figure I’ll upgrade to another retired work station eventually since they make such good gaming rigs!
Right on! One of my machines is a HP Z240 with a 6gen i5 32gb of ram and rx5500XT dual booting mac OS and windows11
Intel XTU can OC that CPU. I have z420 with 1650v2 and it does 3.9ghz all-core turbo. Z440 might be the next upgrade, if you find the whole machine for $100. It moves to DDR4, I put a cheap i7 K in one, or use 16xx processors for overclock.
@@milescarter7803 will have to look into the oc for fun. It doesn’t bottle neck anything I do as is. Actually waiting on my steam deck to come in and I’m going to turn it into a desktop gaming system. It’s very similar score to the Xeon but 1/10th the power consumption:
That's good hardware, HP does put out good stuff from my experience and xeons are generally all purpose kick ass CPU's. That 1060 is a good GPU, hopefully you got the 6 gig version?... I have the 6 gig version and it does great on late titles. I don't run 4k so it'll do just fine for a long time yet.
@@garyr7027 yeah I have the 6gb version. It handles everything I do with ease.
I love these little experiments. Keep it up, man!
Glad you like them!
Nice video. I recently repurposed a friend's old Lenovo IdeaCentre with an i5 6400. I ran into a dying hdd and psu as well. Also accidentally broke the mount for the cpu cooler so I used another mobo. Ended up not using most components and gave it a refresh. The thermal paste was completely dried out. For S&Gs, I tested an RX 6600 for gaming. In some instances it was ok but the CPU was obviously bottlenecked pretty hard in others creating constant microstutters. It does fine with OBS recordings with a RX550.
Yeah that stuff was nasty haha
I have 2 x Lenovo p310 workstations that I got for free from work when they upgraded to newer kit. They both have an i7 6700k with 32GB RAM. I run Microsoft Server 2019 Hyper-V on both, using them to run my Virtual Machines at home. Had them for about 18 months so far, no issues with them at all.
Just got one of these (without drives or gpu, but with an intel nic card) for $95 delivered. I just moved across the country, and im excited to replace and consolidate my homelab with this machine, possibly using proxmox to virtualize my router, NFS, and container services.
At 4:00, the reason why it doesn't have standard SATA power connectors nor your regular ATX connectors because this is an early implementation of ATX12VO before that even existed. That PSU only supplies 12V, and that's one of the reasons why it has less pins (the motherboard itself will deal with the DC to DC conversion) and why it was able to get an 80 Plus Platinum rating for a 400w PSU. It's just ridiculously efficient!
Yeah that makes sense. I even knew it was 12v only, just didn't put all the pieces together haha. Thanks!
i just genuinely wanted to say i've been subbed since
That means a lot thanks!
Might be worth while to do a vid on how you find good deals and avoid potential scams.
Great idea!
I bought a Lenovo D30 a couple of months ago for 70ukp. It had a pair of Xeon E5-2609's and 16Gb or RAM. I upgraded it to a pair of E5-2667 v2s and 128Gb of RAM and it is pretty powerful considering the CPUs cost me 30ukp and the RAM was 50ukp, so for 150ukp I have a hell of a system.
back in and recently got soft soft again, it felt strange and i had previously just taught myself the software. Finding your videos is helping
Great video! I LOVE restoring and re-using "old" office machines like this. I recently picked up an older Dell AiO Optiplex for ~$80 from a local university, and it runs incredibly well for a 3rd gen i5 machine. It's so satisfying to work with older hardware since there's usually always something you can use it for even today. Much better than letting these machines sit in a landfill!
Exactly!
Great video you should make a video on Proxmos or ESXI on old hardware I bet that would be a fun one for research and making in general
Probably doing a proxmox vid with this one 👍
The inside of that system looks very similar to the ThinkServer TS140 that I still use as my daily driver machine today. Paid $400 for it in 2015 and gave it a RAM upgrade and an SSD and it still functions very well today.
I would strongly reccomend going for a used dual cpu Lenovo workstation like the P700 (dual cpu model from that series) or older D30. Usually come with ECC ram, can have much more horses, more standardized ports, and can be racked with a rail kit (afaik). The D30 can be had for that price iirc, and the P700 for $300 to $500 depending on what’s in it.
In general I’ve actually been finding lots of good deals on dual Xeon machines from 2012-2015. Full kitted machines from 300 to 500 depending on ram speed cpu type, etc. and you usually get server level reliability
6:10. WD40 contact cleaner. No bent pins. No residue. Dissolves the thermal paste for it to drip away.
Have you ever used deoxit? Curious if that would work as well. Great tip 👍🏻
@@HardwareHaven unfortunately it's not sold in Taiwan so I can't try. :'(
Yeah that's what I use too works great
BTW I just wanted to answered your question on why Lenovo uses only 12VO ATX PSUs
1. It is better for the environment as it reduces the copper consumption
2. It gives the Vendor leverage on how the components power source quality
3. It is much easier in the supply management and it makes the QA much easier when you are sourcing power supplies from different suppliers.
About the Fan rubber you can use Lenovo support channel to check how to replace the fans , it is very easy you just have to pull these rubber bands out longer till they squeeze out.
I just recently built a new gaming computer but I gamed on a Lenovo workstation for years. Added a gpu, more ram, ssd. It was a trooper.
Great content. I wish that this platform had videos of XP era prebuilts. I would love to work with an ATX standard case.
Looking forward to seeing what you end up doing with it!
I have found these workstations for HALF the price on either amazon or at the goodwill.
I bought a workstation for 300 on ebay and saw a few days later the same one for 150 on amazon. Also saw the same one at the goodwill for same price (150)
Just some advice. I do the the same stuff.
I am the owner of two Lenovo M58p SFF machines. The thermal paste used in those is horrific. In the case of the second M58p, thermal paste even got in the socket just like your workstation. I know these systems of mine are ancient now being from 2008, but I currently have one of them running a Minecraft server very nicely. When I eventually sort out the local media situation, I'm gonna need a better machine for transcoding video as the GMA X4500 iGPU isn't going to cut it.
I purchased 2 NEW Lenovo TS140 about 8 years ago for $200 each with Xeon quad core CPU and 4gb ram. They still work but I don’t use them anymore. But worked great when I was using them with MS-Windows and UNIX. I used an Nvidia GT-710 or 730 for Dual Boot support. I really liked this little mini-tower computer. Never let me down and was rock solid in reliability. These use to sell for cheap NEW on amazon and eBay.
I have a s30 upgraded by myself ( 64 ram, gxt 1660 s & cpu 8 cores) and a p300 . These machines fulfills my needs of gaming and work.
I have recently got myself a yummy deal off of a clueless guy online, too. I got a Lenovo ThinkStation P500 with a Quadro K2200, 256GB SATA SSD, 500GB HDD (which they thought was corrupted, even though it just didn't have any partition table on it), Xeon E5-1630v3, 650W 80 Platinum PSU, 4x 4GB SK Hynix DDR4 2133MHz ECC RDIMM RAM modules, all that for 100$, after negotiating a discount of about 20$. I have upgraded the CPU, GPU, WiFi adapter, M.2 NVMe adapter and got myself a nice budget gaming desktop for about 150$ (net, after selling the old GPU and stuff).
"I love messing with old PC's"
Same bro, it's a really good hobby to have. Keep it up ;D
It's the best haha
I remember buying retired office/school PCs for $30 or so a pop years ago. Turned them into decent entry level gaming PCs for my nephews. They’ve upgraded since but they worked great at the time.
In my humble opinion, the case is very pretty! I like the logo "thinkstation", black and the front looks vintage but serious
Honestly I agree! It looks nice and clean, but is just not incredibly flexible or easy to work in. Should've mentioned that though!
@@HardwareHaven You mentioned it clearly in the video, and I understand that completely, having myself a Dell T3500 that is huge but not great for cables. Perhaps you can use the 5"25 bays to mount HDD
Fujitsu's cases did have drive bays on the bottom, not sure if they still do in 6th gen. Just as serious and more functional.
Good stuff! I think I prefer the Dell Precision line to this, built much more like a server than a desktop with quick disconnect PSU, tons of fans and airflow channels for the RAM. Still only 2 drive bays for some reason... I got a free T5810 from my place of work, probably slower and way more power hungry than this, it's got a LGA 2011 E5 Xeon 1620 v3, 32GB ECC RAM and a Quadro K2200. Still haven't figured out what to do with it but it's a nice system and they go for around the same amount.
Yeah I imagine the makes an impact on the electricity bill haha
You said you thought that hard drive was failing, however I think your experience was pretty standard for the latest versions of Windows 10 running on a mechanical hard drive. I recently upgraded my dads Windows 7 machine to 10 and had the same experience.
I'm still running on 6th gen Intel from when I bought it new. Still does excellent and, with a decent GPU it has zero issues running the latest games with lower AA on some games. With a M.2 drive and a SSD it even runs windows 11 and updated like it was meant to be. I have no reason to go newer at this point, running 10 and 11 on it with two separate drives why change? I keep my system in good condition and I don't buy cheap stuff so it should easily last another 5 years or more. Looking back at all the PC's I've had upgrading for no reason but for the latest hardware, I could have ran them for years more... I won't make that mistake again. A quality barebones system will last a long time if it hasn't been tortured.
Every video u make u get better keep the great work man
I appreciate that a lot, thanks!
Looks like a great platform for a NAS with some ECC memory.
I actually got a system not too long ago with the i7 6700K but no GPU for 130 Euro and it was built by the previous owner so it had a normal power supply and case but also a HDD 😔
That’s still a pretty great deal!
threw an SSD (NVMe even better) and GTX 1080 is gonna be a bombastic build👌
@@baoquoc3710 I put in an SSD (sata) that I already had lying around and a RTX 2060
I got a Lenovo IdeaCentre K410 working and complete for $20 and, much like you, I also enjoy messing with old PCs.
I added a used $50 i7 3770 (originally an i5 3450) and a $1.99 thrifted Asus GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II (BIOS is whitelisted to GeForce 6 series, it originally included a low-profile GT 610).
I also added an EVGA 430W PSU I got for free (included with a $6.99 sffpc case I thrifted for another build).
So far it's the best (cheapest) second-hand build I've done yet.
Getting under the $100 mark for everything was tricky: with the $3 22" Samsung LED FHD monitor (only missing the $2 power supply), $5.99 Razer Black Widow Ultimate 2016 and $3.99 DeathAdder Elite, it actually isn't all that bad to daily for a sub-$100 complete setup.
Awesome!
just ordered a p310 400 watt barebones on ebay for $50. Great home server, especially with the 6 3.5 inch drive bays and 6 pin power
I saw the ports on the board for 6 SATA devices, but didn’t see six 3.5” drive bays. Time stamp?
I’m not crazy about proprietor hardware. (I live very near Dell’s home base and find or get lots of Dell hardware). Since you could sell the GPU and make money back it was worth the price you paid for it. Great video.
Thanks!
Bro, I swear you stole that eBay listing from me… I ended up getting a Lenovo p710 with dual sockets with Xeon e5 2620s and 16 gb of ram. And same graphics card for $300. I am testing it out today!
Hahaha that would be hilarious if so. Sounds like you got a sweet project though!
I recently picked one of these up for work. It is the SFF version and the new job I went in to let me pick a system. It seems to do well and has the firepro card and the same CPU with 32GB of ram. Seems to do all of my network monitoring tasks and drives 4 monitors just fine.
Could you do a video on good uses for 32-bit machines from the 2000-2005 era? I have several and can't figure out a good use for them.
I really want to do a windows XP retro build with that type of hardware!
I have bunch of those as well. Also some thin clients, which are essentially 32_64 bit PCs... I use them a lot for pihole, as they intended to be: thin client alike with an old ThinkCenter proxmox. Fun stuff! Great to watch such channel like this!
I just bought and built an old T5810 workstation myself on eBay for $80.82. I needed to add an AMD 8bg FirePro GPU ($60 on eBay) and adapters to boot to m.2 2280 drives ($25). It would have been a better option for you because of the availability of parts, default ram speed for a E5-1630 v4 is 2400. Once you factor in the price of the m.2 hard drive ($45-500gb) I am around the same cost as yours. The Dell T5810 can stock with a 685watt power supply which made it possibly to use the 8gb gpu.
That system is a screaming deal. Great video!
I think this pc is a good deal. i bought an 200$ pc as well not too long ago, but it only came with an i7 860 8gb of ddr3 sdram and a gts 450 paired with an cheap chinese psu aka a bomb and the hard drive that was clapped out as well so this was a pretty good deal if i do say so myself.
I'd just use it for media storage & web-surfing via hdmi to a LCD TV.
found an older Lenovo thinkcentre for $50 ... my NAS had a socket LGA1155 i7 3770 & this Lenovo had a LGA1155 i5 2320 ... so swapped them out & the Lenovo runs like a champ w/16gigs of RAM & an old GT210 a SSD as a boot drive & a 2TB HDD for storage ... perfect work/HTPC
Nice!
That's not only a Lenovo Disease. My Work Fujitsu Celsius+ died a few Weeks ago. The Technician change at first the Motherboard and like so often it's not the Solution. He tried a new mighty 260 Watt PSU and that was the Solution of the Problem. The Fujitsu used also a 10 Pin Connector to the Motherboard. Power for the Drives comes also from the Motherboard.
the only product i ever bought that was Actually worth it's money ,
was a SubPac M1 and S2 when the M1 broke it's cable , which was my own fault by misusing it
it's basically a subwoofer in your gaming chair or you can wear it like a backpack
the drive these things have , no headphone or ''normal'' desktop speaker could come close to what i feel ,
and you can even give it some more power with an amp , physical amp or software based or even both to really dial it in how ever you like
works with everything , even sends throughput of 7.1 to appropriate headphones , just not the mic signal if you need one
your eyes and basically your body can get a descent massage from this woofer , which there are also nice rumbling tracks to listen to and relax in to.
people are getting ripped of left and right in this world , but this thing was definitely worth the money i paid for it !!
I would love to see this maxed out for what it was intended for, a workstation. What about 4K Video editing? :)
I have a Quadro K620, and I've seen about the same 10w idle draw difference between that being in vs just using integrated graphics.
Interesting... I would've imagined idle draw being less for both of them
the look of the chassis is sick look while also being modular, for disk you can ad a bay in the front empty io
Yeah I will agree that I like the look! And I’m dropping a video today where I add some SSDs into one of the 5.25” bays. Turned out pretty sweet!
I just love your videos. Helps me all the time
I love your videos, keep it up.
Thanks!
Had one Lenovo tower with Haswell Celeron and 1×4GB DDR3-1333 and pretty much dead HDD together with 22 inch AOC monitor saved from dumpster. After changing the RAM to 2×4GB DDR3-1600 and CPU to Xeon 11265Lv3, together with adding GT1030(which I had already) total cost was about 100 USD. Today I have another Haswell with the same CPU paired with RX560 and it actually can do some games. So CPU-wise the one of yours sounds great. But man, faulty PSU is a pain! AT era of manually switching on and off sure delivers so.e tears of nostalgia thought 😅
Love a good dumpster find haha
If you like the form factor and want a NAS look at the thinkserver line. They have a desktop form factor case option that has 8 drive bays in front
Might take a look at one if I find a good deal at some point!
I think the real value in machines like this is ECC support at a reasonable price which is great for a nas. If not for that, there are much more performant platforms that draw far less power. The nice thing about both of those facts is that it will keep prices down on these platforms for folks that want to build a cheap nas with ECC ram.
The card regular sells because it is a cheap way to get a media server set up. The cheapest new card is going to be considerably more expensive than that, if you can even find one.
Wrote a long comment, but it disappeared.
The TLDR;
I very much enjoy your videos, I do a very similar thing but you make it look more interesting.
You asked for other budget suggestions, so I propose the Optiplex series.
They are everywhere and can be had for ~$100.
I have owned three. An SFF I built up for my kid, and two USFF, a 780 and a 9020.
The 9020 replaced my 780 as a MC server and I'm presently looking for a useful-to-me use for my 780 (with upgraded ssd & C2D E8600).
Yeah I imagine an optiplex will find it's way on the channel at some point
I was installing gnome on my arch install but stopped as soon as I saw you're video in my notifications
Haha sorry to interrupt
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPER HELPFUL man!! Thank you
It's a good system if you need a graphics card and storage space. For my own needs it would be too big. I run two websites with some computing needs on an HP office PC (£150). It has an i5 9500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB nvme SSD. The best part is just 7W idle power.
Just came across your video since I'm considering buying and doing a home server with one of these. If you still have the old powersupply, at min 10:00 of your video, there is a slightly bulging capacitor at the top right of the frame, next to the transformer. If you change that one, it should be good, but if you're going to do that, I'd suggest changing all caps and that power supply will go for years.
I might go check that out, thanks!
I'd love to own this, with a GPU like 1660Ti or RTX 2060 it can run all new games like a champ.
Sorry that im late to this video, I am currently trying to get a used Lenovo Workstation for my brother to use.
Haha that's funny
While this is a decent find, I feel like someone should look for something with at least an 8th gen CPU or newer. I got a Dell Optiplex 7060 with an 8700 and 16 gb of ram and a 512 gb sata m.2 ssd for $185. With 8th gen and newer you don't need a dedicated GPU bc intel uhd 630 graphics are good enough for transcoding multiple 4k plex on the fly transcodes simultaneously. The downstairs are limited drive storage and a proprietary form factor motherboard and PSU. However if you have a 3d printer and a Dremel, you can make a few modifications to the case. Personally I plan to just buy a case with lots of drive bays and a new PSU and motherboard. I personally see the PSU and case as a long-term investment though since I can easily reuse them in future builds. Great video btw.
When I made tNice tutorials, there was no working Mac version. On mac, a right click is a 2 finger press on the track pad.
Actually the P310 on ebay is under $40. I have bought 2 or 3 and stripped the mobo out and put in the p300
Interesting that a fairly basic Quadro k1200 is still selling for $80 on eBay.
Some of the fun workstations to play with, if you can get them at the right price, are the ones with LGA2011-3 and LGA2066 chips (like Lenovo P500, P510, Dell Precision 5810 and 5820).
I'll put those on the list, haha thanks
The power supply problem would have been down to the main big capacitor in the PSU. I used to repair & recertify server and PC powers supplies for Dell & HP etc and those FSP's suffered this a lot.
I might try testing it and seeing if it’s worth reaoldering a replacement. Thank you!
Im just looking for any motherboard with Intel network card (really lot of MB using Realtek) to run Vmware ESXI hypervizor. And this looking good, hopint, that Intel NET adapter is not just in this P310 but also in P500. And for 200 bucks its a great deal to almost anything on Linux.
I was looking at the 520 thinking I'd suit for vms and video editing, but then I built another pc instead
That case looks identical to the ThinkServer TS140 I got from a work old hardware giveaway. Same annoyances and fixed it about the same. New PSU and the adapter (although I don't have the problem with the PSU not turning off like you mentioned). The lack of places for 3.5" - mine came with 2 different 5.25" bay converters. The top one has a slim DVD, small fan and adapter for 3.5", the bottom a fan and adapter for 3.5". So it could hold 4x 3.5" but not sure I would ever trust that all running off the motherboard power. :)
Yeah I probably wouldn't trust it either, especially with how little info Lenovo gives on specs
Got a TS150 myself recently that is very similar, pretty nice and quiet machine but man updating the BIOS was a pain and having ECC issues in old BIOS versions is embarrasing.
Also it's meant to run 4 disks so i don't see any reason not to trust it.
From my experiences with Lenovo, they can do one. Pillage it for spares and get rid of anything electronic that bears the Lenovo name.
I died inside a little bit after you said the PSU died, as my main computer has the same symptoms and shuts down after 3-4 minutes. Oh well, kinda expected because it is a Corsair HX520w that was probably released in 2012.
I have dell optiplex 7020 i7 4790, 16gigs rams with Quadro K2200, PSU FSP HV 550W. NVMe 512Gb using pcie x16 converter adapter. Old but enough for me 😁.
If it works, it works!
Liked the video because you included the power draw at the wall on idle and load... This is super efficient really.. I wonder if the evga was as efficient
Thanks!
@@HardwareHaven Btw it's IMPOSSIBLE to purchase this cpu at this price.. incidentally I found out that this is a c236 chipset which is another expensive motherboard to purchase.. main reason I would get it is to put in a e3-1235Lv5 in there (low power 35W + includes a p530 graphics)
nice tuto Thank you!
I'm currently rocking an amd e-300 desktop motherboard with an radeon hd7770. I know it's a huge mismatch, but i was just interested how it'd handle it
oh, and also 4 gigs of ddr3 memory and a 400w power supply
nice!
they sell adapters for the 5.25 bays that fit multiple 3.5 or 2.5 hard drives. that way you can use all the sata ports.
Just don’t make the mistake that I made. Those are fine for SATA SSDs, but I added an HGST Deskstar to the mix and thing idles at 55 degrees. A 5400 rpm 3.5” is what I’d recommend with those adapters.
Very nice MB there and it would make a terrific media server.
For sure, thanks for the comment!
So this Lenovo p310 is socket 1151 and ddr 4. The xeon you show is socket 1150 and will not fit this board. It will fit the p300 which is also ddr3. I had 2 of these and cannot load Win 7, in that it will not read the win 7 DVD
i bought the 6700k when it was new and i was totally hyped and as soon as i had it was totally dissapointed
How about trying PeerTube? It will be much more more fun than another boring NAS. I don't know if it can use hardware encoding, but if so, a graphics card would be very helpful.
Hey! I was literally just thinking if something like that (PeerTube) existed just the other day. I’ll definitely look into it, thanks!
When you said Quadra I was like woah that’s a great card to have
It surprised me a bit, but yeah haha
4:56 in my experience, thats just how it goes with spinning drives on windows 10+
Yeah, I didn’t provide enough detail there though. It was quite a bit worse than my other experiences with HDDs in windows, and was also making pretty horrible noises. I’m not sure why I cut that from the video
@@HardwareHaven Yea, Horrible noises kinda makes a difference with spinners, Probably alot scarier with solid state though... Like, "Theres nothing to make noise there, Why is it making noise?"
When buying off of Facebook Marketplace, do you usually have a maximum distance you'll willing to travel and maximum budget? Surely at some point the distance to travel becomes too large to still be worth it. I'd love to see a video on your buying process for some of these videos.
4:00 I call it Lenovo ATX12VO
i have a dell t5400 dual xeon e5450 with 32gb ddr2 fb ecc ram and a gtx1050ti i can even vr with it and its 15 years old a power house for its age
i have a ibm think station compaq i think and my cats have sprayed on it though so it no longer works but it would be cool to take everything out and replace it with modern stuff :D
mines a think center my bad hehe
as always, an amazing video!!
also when can we get a video for your song, Town Groove??
I hadn’t had much of a request for that, but maybe I’ll post it 👍🏻
well the 1151 is actual good and not that old , i run my file servers with 1150 cpu , one has a i5 the other i3
If you do make a video moving the system into a new case. Is there any chance you would be willing to sell or give me the case, I have a project in mind with an old motherboard. Thank love your videos btw.
250$ I have I5 4590 2hand, B85 2hand, new ssd 240g, new Psu 650w, RX570 4g 2hand or 1060 3g 2hand in my country
Plot twist: That Geforce GTX card was the last nail on already weak PSU coffin.
I took out the front fan and bottom hard drive and but in a 5 bay hard drive cage in mine. The cage fit perfectly.
which kind of cage?
Link for the cage?
I`ve also got a Thinkstation P310 and I think about replacing the PSU by a new ATX PSU (by the help of an adapter). But new PSUs are built different with the fan up or down. How should I place the new PSU without getting problems with the Lenovo's airflow?? If I put the PSU with the fan upwards there's no headroom for fresh air!? And do you reccomend any PSU for this older workstation?
Just got the motherboard and e3-1270 v5 (same cpu with no video) for $45.
That K1200 alone is a pretty good deal, everything else is... just standard stuff.
The interesting old Lenovo workstations' are the 710 or 910, but it's incredibly pricey on ebay for some reason?
Any particular reason that the k1200 is a good deal? Trying to understand why people seek them out so much haha