My new workstation - HP Pro Tower 400 G9
17. July 2025
I have been working on a Thinkpad T470s for about 2 years now. It has 20GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and an i5-7200U with 2 cores and 4 threads. I really love it and using the old mechanical docking stations is a true pleasure. I got it for 120€ from the company I used to work for. Now I will probably use it only when I leave my house or want to work from my sofa.
Yesterday I bought a used HP Pro Tower 400 G9 model 6A773EA from a local online market place. It has a i7-12700 with 12 cores and 20 threads, 32GB RAM and a 500GB SSD. This is a true power machine compared to the laptop. I also really like the smaller case, which is between a Small Form Factor and a regular tower. The price was just 380€, a real steal in my opinion, because new it costs around 1000€.
Why not make a custom build
I really like the idea of building my own PC someday. I'm also not a big fan of HP, Dell or similar brands. But this time I decided to get this pre-built device for three main reasons
- It was cheap
- It works out of the box (at least I hoped)
- I would get lost in details when making a custom built PC
This should save me time and money to actually get things done :-)
As you can see, I like to get used devices for a fraction of the price. It's good for your wallet, for the environment and older devices normally work better with Linux. Anyway, this tower PC is not really old, since it was released around August 2023.
Surprise surprise
When I first booted the device, still with Windows on it, I heard the login sound. At first I didn't think about it, but then It got me, how the heck can this play audio? I never saw before that a tower PC can play audio out of the box and this one does. It's not a great speaker and since I have it under my desk, it doesn't make things any better. But always better than nothing!
Install Debian 12
The first thing on my todo-list was getting rid of Windows. My preferred OS is still Debian, starting from a installation without any desktop environment. Then starting from a pure command line interface, I build the exact system I want.
This was the first time I tested my install script on a complete new machine. And guess what, it didn't work. CLASSIC. So I had to do some manual fixes and take notes on what was missing or went wrong. Hopefully next time this will work better.
Get WiFi to work
Debian 12 was initially released just a few months before this PC came out. So I faced some issues, when installing it, because the WiFi card was not supported out of the box. It has a Realtek RTL8852BE, with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth. This card is supported from the Linux Kernel >6.2 and Debian 12 uses 6.1.
After some troubleshooting to get the card running, I finally got it to work. The trick was getting a newer Linux kernel from bookworm-backports. First, you have to add bookworm-backports to your apt /etc/apt/sources.list.
# add backports for kernel >6.2
# bookworm-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
# see https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en.html#_updates_and_backports
After that I could get a newer kernel from backports.
Backports packages are, of course, not tested in detail like the default stable packages. So only strictly necessary packages should be installed from there. The good thing is that with this I should be able to seamlessly upgrade to Debian 13.
Finally I installed the firmware-realtek package and everything worked after reboot.
This actually took me some hours, trying to install the driver manually or upgrading to Debian 13. But using backports on a fresh Debian 12 install is easy and creates the most stable system possible.
I have to admit that this was the first time I considered using Fedora or Arch. But finally Debian worked also this time and I learned some new cool tricks with backports.
The real impact
By comparing CPU benchmarks I expected that this new PC should be many times faster than my laptop. It feels snappier and generally faster, but not as much as benchmarks suggested. I guess this is related to the fact that most software still doesn't use multi-threading.
My game also does not support multi-threading yet. So it runs faster here, but not to a magnitude teased by the benchmarks. I expected that the match simulation would be much faster, but I was wrong. Everything runs on one core anyway, so it doesn't make much difference. Now I have no excuse to skip learning how to use threads properly in Godot.
Another thing to consider is that my setup is quite lightweight. I use sway-wm, code mainly with the Godot engine and use Neovim as my editor. This combination already felt fast and snappy on my laptop.
I still have to try gaming on this machine. I guess I will be really happy, once I rewrite some of the performance critical code to C/C++. Faster compile times and feedback should make it a more pleasant developer experience.
Every feedback is welcome
Feel free to write me an email at info@simondalvai.org and comment on Mastodon.
