HP Z Series Z640 Black/Silver 2019

The refurbished HP Z640 packs an astounding 64GB of RAM and a huge number of ports into a $870 box, but the Xeon E5-2623 v3 CPU is painfully slow by today's standards. The Quadro K5200 GPU is middle-of-the-road and won't impress gamers or modern content creators. This machine is only worth considering for niche uses like VM hosting or legacy ISV software, where RAM is king and CPU speed doesn't matter. For everyone else, look at a used Dell Precision with a better Xeon or even a Mac mini M4, which offers far more performance per dollar.

The HP Z640 is a relic from the workstation glory days, a mid-tower box built for multi-threaded engineering apps and ISV-certified graphics, now showing up refurbished around $870. Our database has seen plenty of these old Xeon machines, and they almost always feel like a strange mashup of overkill and compromise. This particular config pairs an E5-2623 v3 quad-core Xeon from 2014 with a whopping 64GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD, and an Nvidia Quadro K5200. It's a head-scratcher. The RAM quantity and port selection are genuinely impressive for the price, but the CPU cores and graphics architecture are about as modern as a flip phone.

The target audience is narrow. If you're hunting for a budget Premiere Pro rig that can handle 4K timelines without choking on RAM, the Z640's specs might catch your eye. The same goes for anyone who needs a cheap, reliable box to run old software that demands a Quadro driver or ECC memory support. But for the average person eyeing this for gaming or general productivity, there are far better ways to spend $870. HP's marketing pushes it as "Ideal for Premiere Pro," but that claim is skating on thin ice with a CPU that barely holds its own against a modern mobile i3.

What makes this rig interesting, and also deeply flawed, is the mismatch between its strongest and weakest components. The port selection lands in the 97th percentile among desktops we've tracked, with four USB-C and ten USB-A ports ready for a small army of peripherals. The RAM sits comfortably in the 92nd percentile. Meanwhile, the CPU is in the bottom 13th percentile, and the GPU only manages middle-of-the-pack performance. It's a box that can move tons of data and run many VMs, but it'll struggle with any task that demands fast single-threaded crunching.

Let's cut to the chase: the CPU is the anchor weighing this system down. The E5-2623 v3 is a 4-core, 8-thread chip with a 3.0 GHz base clock and a 3.5 GHz boost, and in our rankings it's just brutal. We've seen this processor in other refurbished workstations, and it consistently scores in the bottom 13th percentile. That means it's slower than an $80 used office PC with a 7th-gen Core i5. For Premiere Pro, the lack of Quick Sync hardware encoding is a real problem, and any modern workflow that leans on single-threaded performance will feel sluggish. The 64GB of DDR4 RAM is the saving grace for memory-hungry creative work, but the CPU will be the bottleneck in almost every real-world scenario.

The Quadro K5200, based on the old Kepler architecture, holds up a bit better in our database but still lands right around the 52nd percentile. It's got 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM, which is handy for GPU-accelerated tasks in older versions of Photoshop or Premiere, but it's no speed demon. For gaming, you're looking at performance roughly equivalent to a GTX 780, which means you'll struggle with anything released in the last few years unless you drop settings to low. The NVMe SSD is a pleasant surprise, good enough for a 64th percentile showing, and boot times feel snappy. Just don't expect the CPU to keep up when you start layering effects onto a timeline.

At $870, the Z640 asks a tricky question: is 64GB of RAM and a Quadro GPU worth paying for when the CPU is this weak? For a very specific type of user, the answer could be yes. If you need a cheap node for running virtual machines or a dedicated rendering slave that leans heavily on system memory, this box does things no other sub-$900 new desktop can match. The NVMe SSD and deluge of USB ports sweeten the deal a little. But for everyone else, the value proposition falls apart fast.

Compare this to a used Dell Precision or Lenovo ThinkStation with a Xeon E5-1650 v4, a chip that actually offers 6 cores and a higher clock speed. Those can often be found for similar money and will run circles around the E5-2623 v3. Even a refurbished gaming PC with a Ryzen 5 and an older GTX 1070 will outperform the Z640 in both raw CPU power and GPU tasks, while drawing less power and taking up less space. Unless 64GB of RAM is a hard requirement and you're allergic to DIY upgrades, the HP is tough to recommend.

The closest competitors listed in our database are an odd bunch, mostly modern gaming towers or compact PCs that serve a totally different audience. The ASUS Republic of Gamers GM700TZ-BS978 and MSI Aegis RS2 AI pack current-gen Core i7 or i9 chips and RTX GPUs that make the Z640 look like a museum piece. They cream it in both gaming and content creation, but they also cost two to three times as much and don't come with nearly as much RAM out of the box. The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i Gen 10 and Dell XPS EBT2250 sit in a similar boat: way faster for modern apps, but you're not getting 64GB of memory or a Quadro card for $870.

The Apple Mac mini M4 is the most interesting foil. It's tiny, silent, and its ARM-based chip scores far above the Xeon in both single and multi-threaded tasks, while the integrated GPU handles 4K video editing with ease. You give up the massive RAM and discrete GPU, but for most creative workflows today, the Mac mini is simply the smarter tool. If you absolutely must stay in Windows and need ISV certification, a used HP Z440 or Z4 G4 with a newer Xeon E5-1600 v4 series is a much better way to spend your budget. The Z640 appeals only when the RAM and port count are non-negotiable and you're willing to accept glacial CPU performance.

Gamers and anyone looking for a primary daily PC should run far away from the Z640. That Xeon CPU will be a constant frustration in everyday tasks, from browsing the web with a dozen tabs open to launching modern apps. Even a sub-$500 refurbished office PC with a 10th-gen Core i5 will feel snappier for these uses. The sheer size and weight of the machine also make it a poor fit for small apartments or dorm rooms, especially when a compact mini PC can outperform it.

If you need a machine for video editing, 3D modeling, or AI workloads, skip this and look at a used HP Z440 with a Xeon E5-1650 v4 or a modern Ryzen 7 system. The only people who should bite are those building a budget server or those running software that is legally bound to a Quadro card and absolutely needs 64GB of RAM. For that tiny sliver of users, the Z640 is a decent deal. For the rest of us, it's a noisy, massive paperweight.

If you're a tinkerer building a home lab or a server for virtual machines, the Z640 starts to make sense. Loading it up with 64GB of RAM right out of the box means you can spin up a dozen VMs without breaking a sweat, and the plethora of USB ports makes connecting external drives or networking adapters painless. At $870, it's a low-cost way to get a quiet-ish, reliable host for Docker containers, Plex, or as a NAS with some CPU muscle. Just keep it in the basement where you won't have to look at its hulking chassis.

For creative work, the story is less cheerful. This machine is marketed for Premiere Pro, but that software has moved on. A refurbished M1 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM will edit circles around the Z640 in both 4K playback and export times, and it costs less. Even a used Dell Optiplex with an 8th-gen Core i7 and a cheap used GPU will be a better daily driver for most people. Only grab this HP if you have a very specific, legacy-tied workload that needs 64GB of ECC RAM and a Quadro card, and you're ready to accept that any modern task will feel like it's running through molasses.