I'd still aim for the 11400 approach, since the old workstations likely won't support NVMe drives, and those make a HUGE difference in perceived speed vs SATA SSD's. The 11400 will use less electricity as well, so lower cost of ownership and less heat produced.

The only real advantage to the old workstations is for video editing, since most Xeon-based systems have more PCIe lanes available. My old LGA2011/X79 system has 40 PCIe lanes vs only 16 in my i9, meaning more bandwidth available for multiple GPU's. That said, in some older systems if they only have PCIe 2.0 each lane will be slower than PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 in a newer system, so a single new GPU would be faster for most people.

None of that makes a difference for PowerTracks or BB, so I'd go with the newer system smile


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