[dashesyan]

You're giving away my secrets! I've bought 3 of these types of HP workstations over the years, starting with a Z210 with a Xeon E3-1240. I added a graphics card to make it a super budget gaming PC.

My most recent one is an HP Z420 workstation with 128GB of ECC memory, an 8-core Xeon, and Win10 Pro installed for $620 delivered. Benchmarks of the CPU show its comparable to a Ryzen 1700X in single and multi core, but I really bought it for the RAM. It's a great machine for homelab-type virtualization.

[lichenwarp]

I have a hp z210 e3-1270v1 3.4ghz, put a 1050ti mini powered by pci-e, works great for my minimal gaming needs and damn save some ram for the rest of us!

[behringer]

I'm still on the z600 after years and I love it. I just upgrade the GPU every few years. I have an extra PSU for it somewhere around here. This thing will outlive me I think.

[izzydata]

Do these older CPUs have hardware level decoding for modern video formats such as AV1?

[chronogram]

Does any modern chip have that yet then?

[izzydata]

Perhaps not. I might be thinking of VP9 if that is what YouTube has been using.

[chronogram]

Ah yes that’s VP9, though you can also use an extension (or just a config tweak in Firefox), or Edge to view h264, which is minimum Sandy Bridge.

Intel Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Amber Lake, Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake CPU families, AMD Raven Ridge APU family, and Nvidia Maxwell GM206, Pascal, Volta & Turing GPU families have full fixed function VP9 hardware decoding for highest decoding performance and power efficiency. (Wiki)

[Havoc]

Judging by youtube modern CPUs are enough for decoding av1

[jotm]

Everything post Sandy Bridge does.

[anigbrowl]

Hmm, that kinda shifts my position on the iron triangle.

[dev_dull]

Where do you buy them?

[dashesyan]

NewEgg and eBay