Z400 Aftermarket Upgrades

[MtothaJ]

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@Niarfe wrote:

Hello All,

I still plan on adding more intake fans on the case and create more postivive pressure to aid the GPU.

Will post pictures later!

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Definietly get the HP Front fan kit, IMO its a must, especiall if you got an aftermarket graphics card in there.

[SDH]

That HP official black plastic front fan holder/fan kit for the Z400 is hard to find now, and expensive.

Rather, you can use a HP 4-wire PWM fan from eBay and add one in yourself.  

Use this forum's search box near the upper left to search for "ghetto mod" and you'll see how I've done it in the past.  I've used that for the earlier xw generation of workstations, and also the xw4600 which has a very similar case design to that of the Z400.

The 92x92x25 mm case fans work fine for this, and those often have a brownish red plastic motherboard header plug end.

[kurt459]

i also own a Z400 i use the official HP liquid cooling kit as well as an RX 470 and 48 gigs ddr3 ecc ram

[hengehog]

Have various HP workstations & am looking at some mods - any help greatly appreciated.

Specifically, a Z400 to which I am looking to add my old Noctua NH-C14 top flow cooler.

I had this on a very overclocked i& before moving to water & now have this spare.

Was wondering if I could put in place of teh standard cooler?

Seems there may ba a mod to do for wiring, but I am unsure if this is just to fool the mobo into thinking there is a high-performance cooler in place when using the standard cooler.

In my case, this will easily out-cool (?) any HP provided cooler (probably even the liquid kit I have on my server - an XW9300 Dual Opteron machine), so no probs - & as it is a top-flow cooler, will cool all of the PWMs etc without any worry.

Any advice greatly appreciated & hope all are having a good day.

I do love HP machines - fantabulous things.

Russ

[SDH]

Here are some questions, and some answers:

1.  Is your Z400 a version 1 or a version 2?  The version 2 is what you'd want to have and it has 6 memory slots instead of 4.

2.  What processor are you running or planning to run?  For the Z400, both versions, they usually ran hotter processors than the more expensive cooler-running ones in the Z600 because the Z600 had to be engineered to be able to run/cool two processors.  Brute force of a hotter-running cheaper single processor could be applied to the Z400 given it only has one socket.

3.  You can tell if you have a "Performance" heatsink/fan in your Z400 by looking at its heatsink fan's white plug end.  If it has holes for 5 pins and a jumper wire from pin 1 to pin 5 it is the higher capacity fan.  You can use that plug on another PWM fan (your Noctua) and jumper wire it like the HP one is and the motherboard will think it is a HP Performance fan.

4.  Normal PWM wiring is pin 1-4:  Ground, +12VDC, RPM feedback from the fan over to the motherboard, and finally PWM control signals from the motherboard over to the motor controller.  A lower capacity "Mainstream" heatsink's fan in the Z400 and many of the other HP workstations will have the same white 5-hole plug end but the jumper wire from hole 1 to hole 5 will be absent (and hole 5 is empty).  I'll assume you'd only be using a hot enough processor to require a Performance HP original heatsink/fan.  You might even be able to harvest the original fan and use it on the Noctua heatsink.  If you choose to harvest the white 5-hole plug end from the HP fan and use it on your Noctua 4-wire fan then you'll need to add in the ground jumper wire assuming you are using a hotter processor.  It is possible to release the metal wire ends from fan plugs, and to reuse those.  You need to be careful, and don't forget the wire ordering.  If all the wires are black then be very careful with good tape to mark them in the correct order.

5.  I assume that Noctua processor heatsink/fan has the parts needed for it to officially (per Noctua) fit on the socket type used in the Z400.  Those came with a bag of parts and fit multiple socket types.  Hopefully you still have all the parts.....

6.  The way the HP thermal control from the motherboard back to the heatsink's HP fan works is that HP tunes the thermal control partially by the heatsink's fan they choose to use.  They use fans that would run at fairly high RPMs if there was no PWM throttle-down control coming from the motherboard.  When that fan is attached to the HP motherboard the PWM control drops those high RPMs down to a reasonable level.  

If instead you take a Noctua PWM fan (which is engineered to run at fairly low RPMs without PWM control) and plug it into the HP motherboard it sees the same PWM control signals and drops the RPMs down even lower.  Thus, you may end up with a Noctua kit that has its fan running too slowly to cool properly.  You can compensate for that by boosting the fan speeds by that one setting in BIOS, but then the other fans go faster.  So, I actually finally settled in on using the HP fans that came with the Performance heatsinks.  You'll need to experiment a bit.  Noctua does have their 4-wire resistor based fan speed controllers you probably know about, and you can insert one of thise in-line with any PWM fan (the resistor is on the DC line) to fine tune the RPMs.  The motherboard will balk if it sees a hot processor in place without getting the ground jumper feedback.

7.  Then, finally, there is the question of whether the Noctua heatsink itself will fit in amongst the other HP components/black plastic airflow shrouds, etc.

Keep us posted, with some pictures as you go, and good luck.

[hengehog]

Hi, & thanks for the fast response.
In answer to your questions:
I have a rev1 z40/, unfortunately, although I could swap this for a rev2 as I have 2 of these at work.
As for CPU - I am already running a w3690 6 core, 3.47 GHz Xeon.
I have 4x4gb hyper X savage pc3-12800 ram running at 1333mhz
A firepro w4100 g/card
2x512gb samsung 850's in raid (raise) 0 through pci-e card with large spinning data drive.
It is already running fine & usually fairly quietly, but can't help feeling the Noctua would be better as I had this in a very overclocked i7 and could barely hear it, which is now water cooled.
I will have a look at the fan & come back to you but I have all spreader plates etc so fitting should not be a problem as long as can is ok.
The wire on Noctua does not have lna or unla connectors - lost these somewhere along the way.
Will have a look & come back later.
Again, thanks for the fast response
Have a great day (come on Lewis Hamilton!)
Russ

[kurt459]

i use the HP water cooler on my xeon w3565 i have the 6 dim version of the motherboard alongside an RX470 and the stock psu as well as 16gigs ddr3 ram

http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/Liquid-Cooling-on-the-HP-Z400-HP-Z800-Workstation.pdf

[xHOLDx]

Hey guys! Notice the builds here are from the Z400 v2 which feature 6 ram slots. I am having the z400 v1 which only has 4 ram slots and a memory max cap at 16GB. I have read the offical manual to see what CPU and ram I could max out. Any others here own a Z400 v1 could assist on this questions?

1) Could I I use the W3690 on my mobo. Understand offically z400 v1 does not support 6 cores CPU and v2 supports W3680 only
2) Currently running 12GB triple channel on the z400 v1. If I max it out at 16GB it will only run at dual channel. Could I run 3x8GB for a 24GB triple channel config?

[SDH]

Answer to question 1 is no.  Answer to question 2 is that I don't know.

Here's my advice:

Go to eBay and buy a Z400 v2 motherboard for about 45.00 USD.  Those are easy to spot because they have the 6 rather than 4 memory slots.  I like to buy used motherboards only if the CPU socket has a cover in place or, better, the original slow processor still present, such as:

 

The very delicate important socket pins will be protected that way until you swap in your new used much faster processor.  You cannot use a W3690 or a X5690 processor in a version 1 4 memory slot motherboard.  That picture is from eBay and that v2 used motherboard costs 45.00 USD, which includes shipping.  I've only been building these v2 upgraded Z400s with X5690 or W3690 processors.

Swapping a v2 motherboard into a v1 Z400 is easy.... plug and play.  I even did a project building up a v2 Z400 in a xw4600 case.  That was more complex and expensive than expected because some of the control cables needed to be converted over from the xw4600 to the Z400 type and the xw4600 power supply was incompatible.  We had all the spare parts available but I'd recommend just buying a slow v2 Z400 off eBay and upgrading that if one does not have a v1 Z400 to do a v2 motherboard upgrade on.   I've been very happy with use of the X5690 processor in my v2 Z400 builds.  It is ideal to upgrade the BIOS on a motherboard to the latest before you install a new processor, but I have gotten away with upgrading afterwards.

An important tip:  The motherboard attachment tray HP uses beneath the v1/v2 motherboards is the same, and it has an under-engineered system to attach the 4 heatsink hold-down screws.  There are 4 threaded holes in the thin metal tray to receive the 4 screws and those are not reinforced, and the metal is relatively soft.  Be very careful to not over tighten the screws or you will strip the threads in the tray.  When you feel the screws just begin to bottom out stop there.  The metal trays are relatively hard to come by.... sometimes one is still attached and included with the used motherboard purchase.

If you change over to the Z400 v2 motherboard and use one of the fastest processors you should make sure to get one of the air flow baffles HP made for their higher end Z400 builds (part number to search for is 591213-001, about 16.00 USD off eBay).  Fill all 6 memory slots with the fast memory HP uses to match the fast FSB of the new used processor.  Here's that air flow baffle and you can see that bottom extension that covers the memory sticks.... the airflow is directed from the front of the case up over the memory sticks and then is pushed out by the power supply fan:

[SDH]

Here is a picture of my conversion of a xw4600 to a Z400 v2.  For some reason the v2 Z400 motherboards are unusually forgiving about running with undocumented Xeon processors.  I, for example, frequently use the 3.46 GHz hexacore X5690 processor that is certified for the Z820 v2 (but which won't run in any Z620 v2).  It runs great in the Z400 v2 under the usual larger 130W rated heatsink/fan (AS part number 463981-001).  I also use the 3.46 GHz hexacore W3690 or the cheaper 3.33 GHz hexacore W3680 processor in these, both of which are rated at 130 W max TDP.

I also discovered how to make an almost as fast "Green" version of the Z400 v2:  The lower wattage/cooler running top dog Z600 v2 processors (the faster 3.2 GHz quadcore X5672 or the slightly slower 3.06 GHz hexacore X5675) will also run in these v2 motherboards.  Those processors are not in the official HP listing of ones that will work in the Z400 v2, but they do.  Those two are each 95W max TDP processors, so they can run under the "Mainstream" smaller heatsink/fan from the Z620/Z820 boxes (AS part number 463990-001).  They also run fine under the larger Z400 130W rated "Performance" heatsink/fan noted above that almost all the Z400s shipped with (and thus are generally the least expensive eBay option).

Here's a picture of the xw4600-to-Z400 v2 conversion running a X5672 with the smaller heatsink/fan:

 

It was a fun project but was not the easy plug and play conversion I had hoped for (most of the xw4600 cables and the xw4600 power supply could not be used).