They spared no expenses! HP Z800 Workstation (PWJ184) 

The lineage of these Z-Station cases probably begins with the HP Blackbird, which had similar features and design but took a standard ATX motherboard and power supply. You could actually order the case alone with nothing in it from HP, but good luck finding one complete system or not, though, they were very (very) expensive.

I think it was the other way around, HP decided to take features from their tower servers and workstations to their gaming PCs, and the Blackbird case was one such attempt.

ATX is a dated and thermally stupid design.

@@User0000000000000004 Still widely used.

@@s8wc3 Z workstations are the successors of XW workstations....Xw8000 & XW8200 (socket 604), XW8400 & XW8600 (socket 771) all dual cpu workstations.(there also existed XW9XXX with AMD cpu's) and before that there was the Compaq W8000 dual socket 603 no gaming lineage.

Thank you! :-)

It's nice, for sure, but it looks like a direct response to the PowerMac G5/Mac Pro, which were certainly several years ahead of this HP. The cooling "channels", tool-less drive mounting, fan power plug integrated into the fan ducts, clean cabling, etc, are all shamelessly ripped from the G5... though they used less polycarbonate and more cheap ABS plastic lol.

@@dregenius Was the PowerMac G5 as modular? All the Macs today seem to be large-scale integration with no upgradeability (other than USB etc.), with the exception of the Mac Pro. I'm not a Mac guy so I don't really know.

Yeah, you got something for your money :-)

:-) very good!

SSD will improve speed quite drastically on those older systems.

Designed so all the parts that commonly fail are FRU's ( Field Replaceable Units) so that downtime is minimal, plus the field service agent can carry around a small stock of them, and go to a lot more calls in a single day. Done to reduce service call time only, as you would have to get the parts from HP themselves, so not having a close to industry standard part made sense to them. Mainboard likely does not allow any other boards to fit in, despite looking almost industry standard from a backplane and connector side, though you can see that this board is meant to have both PCI and ISA boards fit in the slots, so likely this unit was very popular with manufacturers who had older process control or interfaces, as they could use the old ISA card interfaces on it. Not many old machines that had ISA bus cards ever were upgraded to get a PCI version of the card. Either the manufacturer had obsoleted the range, they no longer had the in house design knowledge of the card to actually design the PCI version,very common, likely they only had the final version of the software and ROM's, but no source code or only a very poor version, all the original designers with the knowledge being long gone, as they were "expensive" to have around, cutting into executive bonus. Otherwise the original company had gone through a few M&A cycles, so nobody there actually knew anything, and the range had been obsoleted for this reason. I can see why this range would be desirable, and probably sought after, even if your spare parts were expensive, but still probably available from HPE at a price, as no doubt they also are still doing full managed leases on these machines as well. They probably at end of lease are taking them back, and keeping in a warehouse, as a source of spares as well.

I have never seen that water cooling. Send me a picture to playwithjunk@gmail.com

I have jut bought 2 but more recent, they are incredibly good money for value.

I agree... the only problem we had fom time to time was a defective power supply. Caused by aged capacitors.

​@@PlaywithJunk Thats the only thing that went down on one of my machines. Bought a new one and all is good. When Im ready Im gonna upgrade my main machine to one of the newer Z machines. Ill use the current ones I have as servers to load up large VST sample libraries. I have become a big fan of these machines. Horsepower to spare, dead quiet and very reliable.

Lenovo P series FTW

I have a Z420 (not sure) with AIO watercooling... maybe I should make a video about that too :-)

Yep, I still have a z800 and 400 and xw8600. The 800 and 8600 both have 2 Xeons, the max amount of Ram, and a NVidia QuadroThe 400 has 1 xeon and maxed RAM... All Running Windows 7 Pro or RHEL like new! I am using them instead of my 12 Core 2697 128 GB RAM MAc Pro 6,1. It will probably Keep up if I drop the Ram to 96 GB, though.

The chassis I'm using for a main rig right now was originally a 386/486 era server. It sits on casters on the floor, and has 14 half-height (CD-ROM sized) 5.25" bays, with 4 of them exposed to the front. Originally, it held full height SCSI drives. But airflow was an afterthought when this chassis was designed.

You can add a passthrough card that allows to connect an external storage chassis to the internal SAS ports. Seen it in HP Part Surfer but sadly I don't remember the part number.

@@WalterFabian Yeah, be nice to know how that is done.

@@PoeLemic Found it ! HP Part 398299-001

BlackEpyon , Time to recap?

@@BruceNitroxpro I'll have to check inside, but by the point this came out, most of the "cheap" capacitors had been flushed from the market.

Same and I just picked up 2 x2698v4 for 165 quid.

Your welcome!

“Imagine a 2009 Apple product still being so useful” *Mac Pro 4,1 entered the chat* 😉

That happens often. People have stuff and no idea about the insides... :-)

Depends what you had but in 2012 those would cost like 15 grand or something.

@@thewizardsofthezoo5376 Yes, expensive as fuck, company bought bunch of them by mistake or something. Nobody at the office was complaining. (-:

@@MarekKnapek They had to squander a budget instead of paying it in taxes rather, but hey, lucky guys! Good stuff you can pick them up now for chips, slap a couple of v4 in there with a couple of Ampere GPUs as well becoming cheap a freight train full of Ram, and you got yourself some special PC at home, I am getting rid of all my consumer grade, it's a waste of time and money, you don't imagine how many old mobos, wires, plugs cases, fans and whatever it is you pick up along in 30 years of building shit that always works half way. When I built my last computer 10 years ago, they cost an arm and a leg, a 6 core was all I could find for a reasonable price, then the GPUs and so on, not worth anymore. I have 2 z840 and a macbook pro now and I am not looking back, that's all I need.

Yeah that looks nice too. I just don't like how the first CPU blows it's hot air directly into the second CPU...

If you to resell.. Contact me.. I really like to have this machine..

Grab a couple of quattros for chips and you can still do a lot or look for nvlink capable ones you can get something pretty decent, or A4000 if you come across at 500 or smth, I picked up two for 900 last week.

Maybe you could remove 3.5" drives and instead mount 2 2.5" laptop style drives (SSD today) in one slot :-) Maybe HP offered a 2.5" disk cage as an alternative, they seem to like those.

I modified some of those Z800 when they were new. You can put two SSD's into one drawer and add some SATA cables. But I have never seen one using all ports. Maybe they used that board in another system?

I think that should work but you will probably not find all drivers....

And the graphics juice!!

There is a Z420 (I think...) model with a water cooled CPU. But I doubt that is much better that a conventional cooling because they made it wrong.

I would not, they eat a lot of power, like a LOT. I had a similar thing with dual X5690's and the whole rig would take about 150W idle. A simple i3, even a NUC would be plenty as a NAS and probably even faster, in the end.

Yeah the power consumption is a problem. But letting the HP run 24x7 should not be a problem since it's cooled very well...

Why though? This channel isn’t Eevblog, so why should he imitate Dave Jones? There’s nothing wrong with his videos, imho...

To be honest.... I think i know that expression from Daves videos. I watch them quite often. :-)

Really? I would not expect that....

Nun ja, deutsch denken und englisch sprechen erfordert erhöhte CPU Leistung, da laggt der Output manchmal etwas. Aber ich denke es ist besser geworden wenn man mit den alten Videos vergleicht.... ;-)

So you say HP made a "cheap" version just for the government? Well if you order 1000 or more at once, manufacturers will change designs.

@@PlaywithJunk nor at all, I think all these pieces went missing throughout their lifetime as being used by department heads to read their email on edit: probably just before they were decommissioned, some poor tech had to pull any parts of value (or just parts that could contain restricted information, it's amazing how many places still think they need to pull the dram) before sending them off to the auctions as basically ewaste. Easier for them to not put those parts back and probably got dumped separately

Your second problem, the error message "no video input available" comes from the monitor itself. You get the same message if you turn on your monitor with nothing connected at all. That means your monitor doesn't get a video signal from the workstation. Your first problem, the beep... count the beeps! Is it one or two or more beeps? Long or short beeps? Then google for "HP Z800 beep codes" or look out for the user and service manual. Beep codes and LED codes are explained there. It is also possible that the power supply doesn't work properly. As a general procedure, remove all parts from the system that are not essential for turning it on. For example remove the graphics card and check if it turns on. Remove all RAM except one module. Does it have 2 CPU's? remove one of them. Minimalizing is the keyword!

All companies make different tier products for different markets. The business/commercial lines in any brand are pretty nice. The consumer lines are all garbage. I exclusively run older commercial boxes at home. You can pick up machines that are 2 or 3 years old for pennies on the dollar of original prices, and they're built like tanks and run basically forver

That is something I would like to know too....

4K$ starting i guess.

Next time I will use proper mics again....

I talked about CPU cores and threads in the video. More information can be found by googling "HP Z800 QUICKSPECS"

@@PlaywithJunk Okay, sorry. I watched full video, but I skipped a little of the parts where it was stuff I already knew -- like opening the case, etc. But, yeah, nice hardware -- just its max is 384GB, I think. And it might have said each has 6 cores and 12 threads, so 24 threads. Nice, but the TDP is pretty high for that system. And, I can't believe that they are still so high in price. I'd pay (say) $150/$200 for one, maybe. But, not a $1000. Anyway, thanks for video. I really liked what you have done, and I learned stuff from it too.

Depends of how much you put inside...

I upgraded some of those Z800 and some Z600 with X5680 and they work perfectly fine. So the 5670s should be no problem

@@TimEckert How did you get the X5680's to work in a Z600? The Z600 officially supports up to 2x 95W X5675 and I haven't heard of anyone being able to use higher TDP CPUs in it. Z800 supports up to 2x X5690 which is the fastest for that socket.

I would say all the 56xx CPUs will work. But if you want to know it for sure, google HP Z800 QUICKSPECS. That is available for all HP products.

Something I forgot to say in my last post: 56xx series CPUs does work in Z800's with 11/10/09 boot block date and motherboard revision 003. With revisions 001 and 002 it's a bit hit and miss. Some don't boot at all (stuck at black screen), some boot sometimes, some work without any issues. You can check the boot block date in the BIOS. The boot block date can't be updated so if you have an older version, I'd recommend getting a Xeon 55xx series CPUs. The fastest 4c/8t 55xx series dual socket CPUs: W5590 3.33GHz, W5580 3.2GHz and X5570 2.93GHz.

Ok so it was just disabled.... I will try to enable it and probably I get more BOINC jobs done :-)

@@PlaywithJunk It was probably disabled because of company policy regarding the Spectre and Meltdown related attack vectors with Intel's previous generation hyper-threading implementations. If I understand and remember the news correctly there is no guaranteed way to protect against these with hyper-threading enabled in Intel's chips before first Spectre related design changes.

SUN Microsystems also had some early models of Sparc 5 etc. that resembled much at the first Macintosh models. Either they are constantly spying each other or the engineers move from one company to another. Also the whole patenting war was not so developed then. Today Apple sues everyone who makes a round home button on their phones :-)

I'm not familiar with all the details but this workstation has a SATA controller and SAS disks will not work. Try to find an owners or service manual for the jumper. Try Google "HP Z620 quickspecs" that may help. You could install a PCI RAID controller like a HP P410 or 420 they are cheap now. Or jus a SAS HBA if you don't need RAID. And then connect your disks to that. SAS controllers can handle SAS and SATA drives. But SATA controllers can only SATA.

@@PlaywithJunk thank You very much for good advice! it's very useful for me. good luck in the all your projects

One of the Zx20 models (I think it was the 420) had a water cooled cpu. But the cooling solution was not so perfect. I guess that was more for marketing purposes... WE HAVE WATER COOLING!! :-)

Gtx 970 and up, then yes

It'll last forever. Hey, what do I do if I don't wnat to connect fans to case power. Is there a way just to put fans somewhere (like external drive bay for cooling it) and just have their own power supply and some speed control dial? Or do you know of a way to do that? My extra drives get hot so I need a way to cool them in their drive bay.

I don't know... why not read the user / maintenance manual?

It's a custom PSU, what did you expect?

Yeah if you start changing stuff it's a domino effect, especially the PSU, but they are not really marketed for donor pcs, each element is worth very little unless you need it for another one identical, otherwise it's the the engineering that goes in the orchestration of all those elements that makes it exceptional. Plus after building my own pcs since the 80ies I was fed up with fiddling and some many excess parts that are never good enough, now I want something that works well and fast and without headaches for long. I leave the kids playing with RGBs and light effects, it's as good as stickers on a car and waste current for nothing. I still need to understand who is the fucking moron that looks at his case while he works on his computer. Plus it depends what you do dual xenon are good for massively paralleled jobs across 2 GPUS and 256G?B of ram to take full advantage of what you have, not so much for gaming, that you can do while serving a website.

No chesse grinder??

This was exactly my thought.

I never noticed that. Next time when I'm using it, I must check it out...

They actually could be rack mounted! But they were 100% Workstations.

Mit DEINEM Gerät kannst Du machen was Du willst... :-) Unsere beiden brauchen wir noch...

Yes, the number of fans necessary depends on the configuration. Nothing is cheap on this machine :-)

That drive was not original equipment.... it's my test drive.

Some say Porsche...

@@PlaywithJunk Actually it was done with the help of a company called "Designworks" based in California that is owned by BMW. So It was not done by the engineers in Germany.

@@grlg2 I'm glad it's not Ferrari as they would complain if I repaint or sell it.... 🙂

@@PlaywithJunk Ha, thats funny. I've seen a number of people repaint them as the sides end up being very badly scratched from poor handling and transport. I have two of them, one that I've owned from new and another that was made up from parts. A few years ago I got a brand new empty case when HP in Europe was dumping them for about 70 Euros each. Also had a new spare motherboard and faulty power supply that I rebuild using a server power supply that fits inside the proprietary PSU housing. In my case it was not caps as I had changed almost all of them except the 400v filter caps and once a week it would would still randomly turn off - possibly a bad smd component or fractured solider/track. For me aside from being a great computer it's also a piece of engineering artwork. Cheers.

The "junk" in the title is mostly ironical :-)

@@PlaywithJunk yeah sure, it's ok all junk it's a treasure in others man eyes. Good vídeo and good channel

@@ingmariochen Thank you :-)

I still use a Xeon CPU from this era that would have been sold with this. It works fine with modern apps. Computers haven't really gotten faster at the same rate as they were in the 90s, so old HW isn't that bad usually, as long as it was high-end in the first place. My biggest issue I'm facing now is that it doesn't have EFI, just legacy BIOS, so I can't upgrade to the latest GPUs. That's probably the only thing that would drive me towards a newer machine, and I'd probably only go two gens newer than this (Z840).

@@Manofcube I fully understand you. I have a DELL Power Edge T430 workstation fex that yes the cpu could be upgraded and such but wouldn't do especially much and it works just fine as is and have all what I need like EFI and so on so there isn't really any reason change it out for something faster. But if pre around say 2012 there could be some few issues even if EFI was invented several years before that but not really used much back then. The advantage with old but still somewhat modern enterprise things is that if not to new, they are not that especially expensive either.

In fact some old processors had faster clock speeds than many new ones. But fewer cores and a higher power consumption. If your running applications that use only a few cores, the old machines are probably faster.

@@PlaywithJunk I totally agree with that.

I only used my iPhone for filming with the built in mic.... was a bit lazy yesterday :-)

That chassis was designed by BMW

@@Pasi123 Didn't know that. The reason I said it was built like a Ferrari is because like a Ferrari it was built for ultimate performance without compromise of durability or reliability.

Have you ever seen a Ferrari upclose and under the hood? They are not built very precisely. Lots of gaps and ugly welds. I know a guy who worked in a Ferrari garage and he showed my some details. The workstation is built better... believe me! The Ferrari is just more expensive. He once showed me a electrically adjustable shock absorber from a Ferrari and then one from a Lancia... you know the difference? The Ferrari part was painted red and the price tag was 5x more :-)