The Sleeper PC I Bought Off eBaY And Upgraded: HP ProDesk 400 G3 MT Desktop

So here is the *sleeper PC* I bought off of eBaY for only $124.54 CAD after shipping and taxes in Canada. I did actually test it when it showed up to make sure it ran okay, and it was fine. After that I started ordering parts for it. Let me show you a picture of it below and below that you will see the specifications of this very old PC (2016 btw). (You can find similar HP PC’s to this on Amazon.ca for cheap, you just got to look yourself!, but please remember the link in this sentence is a Affiliate link so we may earn a commission from what ever you may buy!).

• Form Factor: Micro Tower
• Processor Type: Intel i5-6400 (Upgradeable to the 6th Gen 3.4 GHz Core i7-6700 65W CPU)
• Processor Speed (GHz): 3.2
• Memory RAM Size: 8 GB
• Hard Drive Size (GB): No HDD Included
• Operating System: None
• Video Card
• Condition: Refurbished
• Warranty: No warranty

Here is some of the details of the eBaY listing, you can see exactly what I paid for it and notice that shipping was around $51 so that’s just something we have to pay on these sites because deals like this never really offer free shipping at all. I did some research on this PC before I bought it and apparently the CPU is upgradeable to the 6th Gen 3.4 GHz Core i7-6700 65W CPU (see the specifications comparison here) and also a maximum of 32GB’s of RAM. I also watched OzTalksHW on Youtube and he said these older HP’s can take a GTX 1650 XLR8 Video Card so I bought one of those for this machine as well. That video card alone was seriously not a deal at all, I think I paid like $180 for it after taxes and shipping. I will detail all the upgrades for this machine below the image below.

I should mention that I also had a 2TB Samsung Internal Solid State Drive laying around not being used so I threw that in this machine and screwed it into the proper mounting points (which was really hard to find inside the case). Here is the specifications AFTER all the upgrades, including all the costs…

• Form Factor: Micro Tower
• Processor Type: Core i7-6700 ($100 CAD)
• Processor Speed (GHz): 3.4 GHz
• Memory RAM Size: 32GB ($60 CAD)
• Hard Drive Size (GB): 2TB Samsung Internal Solid State Drive (FREE)
• Operating System: Ubuntu 24
• Video Card: XLR8 nVidia GTX 1650 SUPER 4GB ($180)

So, after all the upgrades, I paid about $464 CAD. It is literally almost faster than my current AMD Gaming PC (which I am writing this blog post from). I just think Intel is a bit faster than AMD in some cases, maybe I should do some benchmarking tests in the future. For now, this post is just to document the journey of upgrading the PC. Installing the parts was fun to do and I originally wanted to make a Youtube video out of that but, I just thought “nah, I’ll just write a blog post about it”. So, if my main AMD machine ever breaks down and I need a PC to use until it’s fixed, I have one, and I only ever use it for blogging or for experimentation with Ubuntu!.