Recommend me a workstation or three

[soapyfish]

Hi Guys Its time to replace the office workstations for the whole IT team,

 

We are a small very busy team comprising of

 

1 generalist who works in all area's including video production and virtualisation.

1 focused on audio and video workloads up to 4k quality

1 focused on virtualisation based workloads running 4-5 VM's concurrently on average.

 

Our existing workstations are 10 years old and the school in prepared to spend up to £2000 ext VAT per machine to meet the needs of each user for at least 8 years. We are very lucky to be in a trust that understands the value in providing staff with the best tools they can. We currently have 3rd gen 4 Core low end xeons in HP Z620's

 

With the arrival of windows 11 and the TPM requirements (unless this has changed) and all the new tech arriving soon 13th gen intel CPU's as well as PCie5 and DDR 5, NVMe...etc

I need some advice on getting the best bang for the buck as it were.

 

It seems to be a terrible time to buy with the removal of standard threadripper CPUs from the market. HP not offering anything newer that 10gen intel based Z Workstations.

I know I am focusing on cutting edge tech but these machines will be unchanged for the next 10 or so years so reliability and support are important hence the choice of the Z620 last time.

 

I would be interested in hearing what others who have a similar work load have recently been purchasing and if expecting machines to last this long is now totally unrealistic.

[FN-GM]

It seems to be common to have the virtual machines running on a server and then issue a standard device.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I'd seriously consider some HP Z6 G4's with beefy Xeon scalable CPUs.

 

They'll be relevant for years to come, are fully windows 11 compliant and a damned sight cheaper than going for the newest version HP have lying around.

As luck would have it, I happen to have plenty of these lying around the warehouse

 

As a quick guide £1,300 would get you something along the lines of the following:

 

3.0GHz 18-core Intel Xeon Gold

64GB DDR4 (4 x 16Gb)

512GB NVMe SSD

Nvidia Quadro P4000 (8GB RAM)

 

They would be monster machines!