Compatibility of Z cooler and z820

[ManChicken]

Hi Vhunjek,

I know this is an old post but I'm curious if you ever wound up getting a Z Cooler and installing it in a z820 with success? I currently have a z820 with a failing water cooler and am looking for a replacement, and this seems like a much better solution if it fits.

[DGroves]

if you search ebay, for "HP water cooler AIO" you will see listings for some hp units that while for a consumer system is the same pump/radiator as the z820 only thing different is the hose length and no bracket from pump to radiator if you can remove this bracket from your onl unit, you may be able to use this model cooler

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Original-2011-1366-1150-1151-Water-Cooler-Radiator-Water-Cooler-657398-0...

[ManChicken]

So, I went ahead and grabbed a couple Z Coolers from eBay. The Z Coolers mounted and fit just fine.

The Z Cooler has a 3-pin fan connector, but of course there is no fan or pump or anything; only pins 1 and 3 were wired (Ground and Sense) and are just screwed into the side of the cooler. However the fan headers on the Z820 (the liquid cooled version anyway,) are 4-pin connections, although the liquid coolers are only wired for the first 3. In order to connect the Z Coolers to the header so at least they'd be grounded, I just took an Xacto knife to the fan connector and cut off one of the guide tabs so I could get it onto pins 1-3 of the motherboard header.

When booting the machine, the BIOS throws an error: "528: CPU requires liquid cooling system" -- however, you can just hit F1 and boot anyway.

Monitoring my CPU temps shows everything is working great. So for ~$200 my Z820 is running very cool and lives to work another day.