HP Z620 Radeon Sapphire VII

[Integrat0r]

Hi

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if the Radeon Sapphire VII is compatible with the HP Z620?

I bought a Radeon Sapphire VII off ebay, but it just keeps randomly crashing/black-screening on me shortly after boot - the seller insists it's working, but I have no way of testing it outside of the Z620. 

Symptoms:
- Install phase of an OS: it's OK works as expected (provided a single monitor is used)
- Logging in to desktop: logs in then crashes after about a minute or so
- Boot to BIOS: delayed in some cases when compared with the K600 I had previously installed.
- Remove a USB3.1 PCIe card in slot 2: keeps the system stable for longer but will still inevitably crash.

- Boot to MacOS with more than one display and it's flickering and producing artefacts on the screen.

Remediation:
- DDU to uninstall all drivers and installed clean from AMD and Windows - both failed
- Clean install of Windows 10 1903 - boots to desktop then crashes
- Clean install of MacOS 10.15.3 - boots to desktop and crashes a short time later.
- nVidia K600 - This card works native in both MacOS and Windows, it's clears up all the abovementioned issues when swapped out with the Radeon.

The 2x6-pin adapters have been upgraded to the 8-pin connectors using the HP 6-8pin adapters. The Radeon VII uses 2x8-pin (a total of 300watts), the Z620 has 2x6-pin which are providing up to 300w combined, above the standard ATX standard.

After a bit of research it turns out the Z620 will only support GPU's with up to 225watts in those PCIe x16 slots. Could this be the reason?

The system specifications for the HP Z620, https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/157623iC856EE2C28DD0C8B/image-size/original?..., state that a card exceeding 225 watts of power shouldn't be plugged into the graphics slot.

But it also states that the power consumption of ALL PCIe the cards should not exceed 300w. The Radeon VII can peak in power above 300w as can be seen in this graph [https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/BfayBCmUfK6uUzFTqDtZY.png. 

Could this be the cause of the random crashing? Thanks in advance.

[Brian1965 · Accepted solution]

Hi Integrat0r,

You are correct in that HP states the maximum power for a single GPU (in the Z620) shouldn't exceed 225W. However, as mentioned many times previously in the forum, the HP workstation power supplies are manufactured to a higher specification than the ATX standard. I can confirm that the GTX 1080ti card (250W) runs absolutely fine in the Z620 but your 300W GPU card is drawing too much power from the Z620 PSU, causing the system to shut down. (I also have a Quadro P2000 and M.2 / PCIe card installed, so my total power draw from all the PCIe slots is around 332W.

I have also heard that RTX 2080ti runs in the Z620 which is a 260W card.

[Integrat0r]

Hey, many thanks for you reply. I thought as much. Going to sell it and get a 5700 XT instead. 

[Integrat0r]

Some additional information supporting the fact that OS or driver issues were not the cause here:

 - BIOS would take unusually long to post sometimes 

 - bios would beep with the error that certain PCIE slots like the Wi-Fi card were erroring, these had not previously errored before. 
 -  USB3.1 PCIe card had to be removed to allow for a longer sustained desktop experience, eventually even this was not enough to keep the z620 stable with the AMD Radeon VII Sapphire, however would stay alive longer Than when the usb3.1 card was in the machine.

hope that helps someone out there.