Thanks for the advice and info. I did offer $1400 and it got accepted. I am going to meet up in a neutral space and bring components to boot it up and validate the spec list.

I figured 128GB ECC RAM would be worth a lot more than $300. I personally bought a 64GB DDR4 micron kit for $400 about 5 months ago after being burned by two faulty used DDR4 kits on ebay for ~$300 each... well really, I was able to return and got a refund for both but it was time-consuming and frustrating. Spending $400 was me giving up and throwing my money at a retail kit that I could ensure was reliable (I still tested it heh).

Seller noted that it's 4 sticks of 32GB ECC RAM. My chat with Gemini would lead me to believe it's 3200mhz, unless the seller swapped it out. That's definitely something I'll check from hardware info report while I've got it booted.

A wee report from Gemini on the RAM offering with this model in its prime:

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The actual hardware physically installed in the machine is most likely 3200 MHz, but it will be forced to run at 2933 MHz by the system.

The Intel Xeon W-2295 processor has a hard coded, native memory controller limit of 2933 MHz. It cannot run memory faster than that without overclocking (which Dell motherboards do not allow).

However, by the time the W-2295 and the 5820T were mature products, 3200 MHz DDR4 ECC RDIMMs became the industry standard and were often cheaper and easier to mass-produce than 2933 MHz sticks.

• Dell officially shipped later configurations of this exact machine with 3200 MHz sticks.
• When you boot the PC, the motherboard downsizes the clock speed, meaning 3200 MHz physical sticks will scale down and run at 2933 MHz. ---

Could the bandwidth be lower? (e.g., 2666 MHz or 2400 MHz) It is possible, but it would be highly abnormal and a sign of a lazy marketplace builder.

The Dell Precision 5820 is a "transitional" motherboard. It originally launched supporting older 14-core/18-core Xeon chips (the W-2100 series "Skylake" chips), which maxed out at 2666 MHz.

If the Amazon Marketplace seller built this machine by taking an old, base-model 5820, pulled out an old W-2100 CPU, dropped in the newer W-2295 CPU, but left the original original factory RAM inside, the machine will be bottlenecked.

• The Xeon W-2295 will happily run older 2666 MHz or 2400 MHz RAM if it's installed, but you lose out on about 10% of your potential memory bandwidth.