Cracking Open the HP Z820 Workstation

I like the design, for a major brand.
However I have been bitten real bad many times from custom parts from the major manuf trying to do replacement parts and/or upgrades that I only customs build my own personal PC's myself now from standard components so easy to replace, cheaper, and can upgrade the way I want with common parts and not be held hostage by over priced upgrades or like one time was promised to be able to upgrade CPU's later when bought one Dell I had, very soon after buying the workstation they discontinued it and never offered the upgrade option afterwards.
So as good as that one seems, I am going to stick to building my own again for my next upgrade. But for many who do not, seems like a good choice for a high end workstation.

mwclake1 concerns about customs parts is valid and it is for that reason that the true number of PC sales is skewed. There is large number of independently built computers, which is why accurate new PC sales are not and cannot be correctly accounted for. It is therefore likely that the post PC projections a very wrong indeed.

I like the design, for a major brand.
However I have been bitten real bad many times from custom parts from the major manuf trying to do replacement parts and/or upgrades that I only customs build my own personal PC's myself now from standard components so easy to replace, cheaper, and can upgrade the way I want with common parts and not be held hostage by over priced upgrades or like one time was promised to be able to upgrade CPU's later when bought one Dell I had, very soon after buying the workstation they discontinued it and never offered the upgrade option afterwards.
So as good as that one seems, I am going to stick to building my own again for my next upgrade. But for many who do not, seems like a good choice for a high end workstation.

and I love the fact they still have PS2 keyboard and mouse ports.
With the above normal computing I do, I have run into problems with keyboards and mouse sharing USB, many times doing the extreme graphical programs when using a mouse on a USB port I get a lot of problems on many USB only computers.
And I have hated the P4 architecture, was thinking ov going to AMD next upgrade.
Although I did have an older Dell that had a 1.8 single Ghz Xeon, for my windows only machine and remember that thing sometimes would perform as good or better than my other 2.5 Ghz P4.
Was either thinking AMD or the new i3/5/7 processors but may be worth looking at a mutil core/processor Xeon also.