HP Z620 RAM upgrade : worth it or go for a more recent workstation?

[SDH]

Medical Imaging monitors tend to be very expensive, and Barco ones are excellent and expensive. These all have to be FDA certified in the US or risk medicolegal consequences. Calibration conformance is checked repeatedly, in some cases in near real time. One way the manufacturers boosted their profits in the old days was to also offer very expensive proprietary video cards and proprietary drivers, some of which were absolutely required to run the monitors. I've even seen the EDID signal coding/decoding changed from international standards so that certain medical monitor signal decoding would not produce images without a matching EDID abnormal encoding being sent from the proprietary video card.

That changed years ago to use of "open source" high quality fast video cards to drive the medical monitors and their calibration software. We use CAD-quality Nvidia cards that have specific grayscale drivers built into the freely downloadable drivers sets. Those driver subsets are engineered to work with multiple vendor's medical monitor calibration software, and the general CAD pro or consumer does not even know about this. What gamer would want to play their games in grayscale? Long story short is that Barco card is way old news, and you can do much better.

Video cards have come down in price for much faster and cooler performance over the last 10 years. An "oldie but goodie" to look at is the Nvidia M2000 from 2016, HERE, with 4 full size DP ports if you want to keep costs down and run 4 monitors at once and still have one empty PCIe3 x16 slot to dink with in your Z620 v2. Nvidia is still releasing new W11 drivers that work with it. In contrast, the Barco card might use proprietary drivers, hard to obtain, and not updated for a long time by now.

Or consider a move up to the more recent recycled P series. Don't lust after a Barco card that was released in 2016, HERE, despite its original overcharged price. It might not even work if you don't have the correct old drivers.

p.s. You can do much better than the Z620 processors you are currently using. It is worth the effort to figure that all out. You'll get encouraged when you see how expensive the higher end dual QPI link v2 processors were on original release vs now... that initial cost info is under the specifications tab on their Intel website. The eBay recycled cost now is so low because the same processors that are used in these workstations were also used in a very large number of same-era servers (which tend to get recycled earlier).

[JC_Work]

Brilliant - thank you once again for all the info! I'll need a few days now to study and do the homework (Processors, RAM and Video Cards)  🙂

JC