HP Z2 G4 motherboard question about M.2 slots

[wny2016]

Looking at HP specs and documentation, it appears that HP Z2 G4 towers might come standard with two M.2 slots on the motherboard. Or, then again, maybe only Z2 G4 towers running Xeon processors have the two slots, whereas the Intel CPU-equipped machines do not. There is no "official" HP documentation that I can find that addresses this. Does anyone know for sure?

[NonSequitur777 · Accepted solution]

@wny2016,

An HP Z2 G4 Tower Workstation with motherboard SSID: 8455 as fitted with an Intel Core i9 processor (i9-9900K), as seen here: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/47036025, shows it has two M.2 NVMe slots.

An HP Z2 G4 Tower Workstation with the same motherboard (SSID: 8455) and fitted with a Xeon E-2224G also shows that it has been fitted with two M.2 NVMe slots (mind you, this user used a third M.2 NVMe SSD using an M.2 NVMe SSD to PCIe adapter in a PCIe Gen3 x4 slot) as seen here: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/51329104.

Also, the documentation I found online for HP Z2 G4 Tower Workstations, suggests that all such models are equipped with two M.2 NVMe SSD slots: https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-z2-tower-g4-workstation/20063240/document/c06100744#AbT6.

The same document shows that both Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors are compatible on the same motherboard, so it appears to me that there are no two different motherboards, one for Intel Core and one for Xeon processors, but only one.

Hope this was helpful.

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[wny2016]

Thank you. I had been looking around on these discussion boards and there are some comments here and there that suggest there are two different motherboards for Intel and Xeon CPUs. Certainly, the RAM requirements (I am pretty sure) are different, as the Intel CPUs require non-ECC memory, and the Xeon CPUs require ECC. I have no idea if the pinouts of those memory sticks are different.

On a somewhat related topic involving the motherboard M.2 drives on Z2 G4 machines, in the pursuit of attempting to run these two drives as RAID 1 or 0 using the Intel RST software, there is also some discussion as to (a) whether this is even possible and (b) whether Drive 0 (the first slot) must be an Intel brand NVME SSD stick in order for the RAID to work. One of our clients just bought a pair of new Z2 G4 machines, so we shall see.

[NonSequitur777]

@wny2016,

You made a most interesting observation, worthy I thought to look into this a bit more.  For the i9-9900K the RAM specification is "ECC Memory Supported: No", whereas for the Xeon E-2224G it is: "ECC Memory Supported: Yes".

Both the Xeon and the motherboard need to support Non-ECC RAM, which it apparently does, since the Xeon benchmark link shows that the RAM sticks are ECC memory, including a Hynix HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN 16GB DDR4 PC4-25600, 3200MHz 2RX8 ECC Memory RAM stick.  The Intel Core benchmarks all show Non-ECC RAM, such as Samsung M378A1K43CB2 4x8GB RAM.

The pinouts (288-pin) are the same for both ECC and Non-ECC RAM sticks. It looks to me that depending on what processor you install in an HP Z2 G4 Tower Workstation, you either have to use ECC (Xeon) or Non-ECC RAM (Intel Core).

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777