Hardware

HP Z4

Low end workstation from HP. The workstation case is as light as a feather, perhaps indicative of build quality but probably necessary to keep costs down. It's fairly quiet even with that damned secondary fan. Total cost of this box was £2,666 inc VAT in February 2018. Rather annoyingly, one cannot simply buy an HP workstation from HP, one must do so through a salesperson.Link to product.

Item	Spec	Comment
CPU	Xeon W-2125 4 core 4.0 Ghz	I favour processor speed over number of cores. And Xeon 'cos ECC.
RAM	32Gb	The more the merrier. Even ECC is fairly cheap
Storage	512Gb "HP Z Turbo drive" and a 1Tb M.2 SATA SSD	HP likes to make this complicated.
Graphics card	AMD Firepro W400	I bought this workstation without a graphics card so I could reuse my existing one. A mistake with hindsight as the W400 is not "HP approved". In the end HP send me a secondary fan for the Z4 (it needs an extra fan for high end GPUs) and it worked.

Dell P2715Q X 2

Acceptable Dell 4K screens. Light anti-glare coating. They're IPS and although the built quality is low rent, they've worked perfectly for 4 years without issue. Purchased in Dec 2015 for £877 inc VAT for 2 from PCBuyit. Seems expensive now.

Microsoft Surface Keyboard

Good replacement for the Apple keyboards I used to shoehorn into PC usage. Batteries last ages. I use a bluetooth dongle to connect this device. Link to product.

Bluetooth adapter

I use this to connect my Microsoft Keyboard to my PC. It works and it's cheap.Link to product.

Logitech MX Master

Good mouse. There are newer versions. Anyway, buy it on sale or you are overpaying.Link to product

Logitech H800

Decent wireless headset although build quality is pretty basic and I find they fail after a couple of years of use. I use the proprietary wireless adapter as the bluetooth sound quality seems inferior. The price of these things varies a lot. I paid less than £20 on the Amazon business site on 12-dec-2019.Link to product

Lenovo Thinkpad P1 (Gen 1)

Excellent laptop. The build quality is top notch. Second picture shows the guts of the machine, which I experienced when upgrading. I bought the highest spec processor with the least RAM and SSD and upgraded them myself, saving about £500. Lenovo has frequent sales, so buy at the right time. The link is for the G2 version.Link to product.

Item	Spec	Comment
CPU	Intel Core i7-8850H Processor (9MB Cache, up to 4.30GHz)	The Xeon was too expensive.
RAM	32Gb	Bought with 8Gb and upgraded with 2 16Gb memory sticks as Lenovo charge over the odds for RAM.
Storage	512Gb NVME M.2 + 1Tb NVME M.2	Bought with single 512Gb M.2 card and installed the 2nd one myself.
Display	15.6" 4K UHD Touch (3840 x 2160) IPS	Excellent display on this thing.

Synology DS 918+

Very good NAS. Feather light compared to my old HP Proliant Microserver, so the jury is out on build quality. But the jury has returnd a positive verdict on the software that Synology utilizes - it's superb. I added an 8Gb stick of RAM to make it up to 12Gb and a 256Gb SSD cache for the sheer hell of it. Don't make my mistake - make sure you buy the NVME variety of M.2 SSD, not the SATA.Link to product.

Mikrotik

I have a range of their networking kit including a CRS125-24G-1S-IN as my main firewall/router/switch, several hAP ac boxes, a hEX PoE and a couple of mAP lite boxes. Their software is very powerful and there's a good user community. They also update frequently. It's basically the opposite of the main network manufacturers.Link to product.

Epson EcoTank ET-2710

This printer feels ludicrously light. It has bottles of ink, so you aren't getting screwed on ink cartridges, but you pay more upfront for the printer. It has no front panel, so you need to install their shitty software for scanning. There are few things worse in life than printer manufacturer engineered software. I would buy one with a panel next time to avoid this. Link to product.

FLEXISPOT Height Adjustable Electric Standing Desk

Bought this to jump on the standing desk bandwagon. Seriously, it's good not to sit down all day. And I'm very happy with this purchase. I bought the maple top separately and I'm fairly happy with that as well. The word "fairly" is based on the veneer separating a bit at the front, but it's not a disaster. Link to product.

Bestand Dual Monitor Arm

It's nice to have ones monitors suspended in mid air and this does the job. The attachment to my desk is a bit gangsta' as the flexispot top has a lip which means this doesn't officially work. But the weight pivots towards you so it's okay if the desk doesn't lean backwards. I can tell you that if the desk does lean backwards, very bad things happen. I have scratches to prove this. Link to product.

Flexispot CPU Holder Under Desk

This keeps the HP Z4 in place so it goes up and down with the desk. It was scary to fit it and the mounting seems unnecessarily precarious but no issues so far. It was surprisingly hard to find this item. Link to product.