Heya
Looking to grab a USFF to faff around with Linux, common machines, getting them without RAM/SSD:
CPU/gfx - The differences are so minute is it worth the $50 difference?
- HP 800 G2 i5-6500T/HD530 ($160)
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M710 i5-7400T/HD630 ($210)
RAM - Supports DDR4-2400, have some DDR4-3200 lying around, they'll just clock down without any issues?
Thanks!
Yeah wanting to get a 35W unit to pretty much run 24/7 dedicated to some of the projects and things I've wanted to do/learn for ages.
I did go through the specs for the CPU and onboard gfx however couldn't really spot anything notible, was eyeballing a stick of intel optane nvme which looks to only work with 7th gen thus the 7400T however that may be pushing the budget.
I'll double check the 6500T's DDR4 support, assming it does, is the 2400 vs 2133 worth it in exchange for the cpu/gpu?
HP 800 G2 - 99% going to be DDR3 (bad)
Lenovo ThinkCentre M710 - 100% M.2 SATA only (NVME waste of time)
I wouldn't buy either of them. Consider a used laptop off ebay.
I double-checked the benchmarks for the two CPU's and they are identical. The GPU on the 7400T encodes x265 in hardware whereas the 6500T does not. Based on this, I'd agree with Currynuts and save the $50 to go with the 6500T.
I don't think you will notice too much difference on this tier of compute, of course ram speed will affect some workloads, but with the measly difference between 2133MHz and 2400MHz I doubt it will affect any workload noticeably. This is also dependent on the cas timings supported by your memory at 2133 and 2400 bear in mind - but also not too much difference with most workloads.
Cool, I figured it was all so razor thing marginal anyway, thanks for the confirmation :)
How much is this ? what about getting 5600G ($200 ?) + cheap B550M ($80 ?) + 32 GB DDR4 ($150 ?) = Linux VM's for life
Just the price in my post, recently upgraded someone's new USFF x2 and they just give me their 32GB DDR4-3200 (albeit 8GB x 4), going to sell them off and get slower 16GB x 2. Already have spare M.2 for boot and shucked 4TB SATA for media/torrent.
Really only after something super small/quiet/low wattage, anything taxing I'll just VM off my main machine.
Surely if just you're wanting to just muck about with linux distros, consider just deploying VMs on an existing machine.
However if wanting to utilise a separate machine for a bare metal approach, The HP 800 G2 i5-6500T/HD530 would be the better choice. Even though the i5-7400T has newer Intel HD630 graphics (albeit also slower than the HD530 by 150Mhz whilst turboing) the CPU itself is slower than the i5-6500T, as the max turbo frequency is up to 3.00 GHz compared to the i5-6500T's turbo of up to 3.1GHz making it 100MHz faster than its successor. Considering the i5-6500T is also $50 cheaper it would be the better buy. As you have DDR4 already, ensure the motherboard on the HP 800 has DDR4 slots instead of DDR3, as the i5 6500T supports DDR3 and DDR4 up to 2133MHz (advantage of the i5-7400T which supports DDR4 2400Mhz)