HP Z800 Upgrade with Titan Xp or Quadro M5000? Power Upgrade? Cooling Upgrade?

[SDH]

The power capacity of the 6-pin PCIe supplemental power cables has been a topic in this forum related to the Z420/Z620/Z820 series of HP workstations.

The "ATX standard" for these supplemental PCIe power cables is 75W each, and also 75W for the PCIe x16 card slots.

HP builds to that same wattage for the two PCIe x16 slots , but their PCIe supplemental power cables are built to a higher standard.  12V 18A.  So..... 75W from the slot and (12 x 18) 216W from the cable gives you 291W for the card max input.

I'm not saying one should run 582W of cards through those two PCIe x16 slots.... just that you might be underestimating what HP has engineered to.  If I were you I'd spend some time finding the HP adapters for 1 6-pin to 2 6-pin and 1 6-pin to 1 8-pin.  Remember that many of the adapters out there are not built to HP standards.  Some part numbers are here in the forum.

504632-004  is the latest technical manual.... download that via a google search and read the relevant sections.  The number of slots in a Z800 and what they can do are detailed there in the manual.

[DGroves]

what i'm concerned with is that each molex connection produces a mesurable voltage drop and the  18ga wire used on most atx supplies coupled with  GPU cable extenders  can also cause a voltage drop. if you take a atx supply and the add on GPU extenders to increase the lenght of wire so you can place said supply somewhere next to the z800 you might have a length of thin wires going through 3 or more molex connectors. this can be a recepie for  major issues when pulling 500 watts or more through it  especally if you have a bad crimp on any of the wires going to those molex connectors

i am also not keen on placing a aux power supply next to a z800 that sits on the floor where it can be kicked with feet or whatever and will be a major collector if dust due to the atx fan intake being on the floor or have the intake blocked by something

i'm not saying what has been proposed  will not work (far from it) just that it's not something i or most companys would  consider attaching to a workstation that is used to generate a proffit

and yes i have seen the HP adapters for the video cards, said adapter kit was ordered from HP about the same time the evga 1080  card was ordered for the z820 and i would guess it uses 16ga wire instead of 18 ga wire and the crimping of the wire to the connector is first rate

[SDH]

DGroves..... totally agree that having an external power supply is a horrible idea.  I was trying to educate the OP that use of an internal power supply is not only a much better idea, but also that the HP power supplies are engineered to higher ratings than the OP may have read during research into consumer grade computers and ATX-standard power supplies.

[BambiBoomZ]

Prettypicgirl,

Making a quick Partpicker system using:

2X 130W CPUS (LGA-2011-3)

2X high capacity air coolers

Dual processor motherboard

64GB ECC Registered RAM

500GB SSD

4TB HD

2X GTC 1080 (MSI)

> produces a system power requirement of 796W. 

Given the best efficiency of power supplies is at 80% of rated capacity, the above requirement suggests  (796 = .80x)  a power supply of 995W.  The 850W PSU would probably work but ultimately a  moment would occur for which it did not have sufficicent headroom.

However, it is worth considering at this point, the needfor two processors. Graphics and many 3D modeling applicications (Solidworks excepted) are still not able to effectively utilize more than 5-6 CPU cores.  See the excellent Puget system articles on this subject. If you are changing to GPU graphic processing, it may be possible to use a single 6-core, thereby making the 850W PSU sufficient.  This will also concentrate CPU accessiibility to the entire amount of RAM.

My previous VRay fro Sketchup rendering workstation:

HP z620_1 (2012) 2X Xeon E5-2690 (8-core @ 2.9 /3.8GHz) / 64GB (4X 8GB +4X 8GB DDR3-1600) / Quadro K4200 (4GB) / Samsung 850 Evo 250GB + 2X Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB / 800W > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit >  2X HP U2715H (2560 X 1440) [ Passmark Single Thread Mark = 1903]

However,at the same time, for 3D modeling:

HP z420_2 (2015) (Rev 3) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 (6-core @ 4.1GHz)  / 32GB DDR3 -1866 ECC RAM  / Quadro K4200 (4GB) / Samsung SM951 M.2 256GB AHCI + Intel 730 480GB (9SSDSC2BP480G4R5) + Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX  1TB>  > 600W PSU> > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H  (2560 X 1440)

It was surprising  to leanr that z420_2 could produce the identical, all CPU  rendering faster on  6-cores at an all-core clock speed of 4.1GHz than z620_ 1 could on 16-cores at 3.4GHz.

The 6-core being faster in CPU rendering was due partly to teh clock speed, but more to the  utilization of cores being very poor on almost all the application I use: AutoCad, Sketchup, Adobe CS6. Adobe CS6 actually doesn't even recognize dual processors- or dual GPU's.   Performance in 3D and most of the grpahic design and image editing was based on the single-thread (performance on a single core).

Based on what I'd learned. I decided to combine the modeling and rendering into a single system:

HP z620_2 (2017) > Xeon E5-1680 v2 (8-core@ 4.3GHz)  / z420 Liquid Cooling / 64GB DDR3-1866 ECC Reg / Quadro P2000 5GB / HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 256GB / HP/LSI 9212-4i RAID Controller > Intel 730 480GB + HGST 7K6000 4TB / 825W PSU > Windows 7 Prof.’l 64-bit  > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H  (27" / 2560 X 1440) +HP 2711x  [Passmark Single Thread Mark = 2339]

Improvements in working speed are are impressive. The single-thread perormance in so much content creation is most important.

Single configuration processors always have a a better single-thread performance as the data and memory links to the second processor are not present.   The fastest single CPU LGA1366 is the Xeon X5687 @ 3.6 /3.86Ghz but that is a 4-core and the fastest 6-core is still the X5690  3.47 /3.73Ghz. The Passmark single-thread rating for the Xeon X5687 is 1575  with qverage CPu Mark of 7123 and  Xeon x5690 is 1506 / CPU = 8995, thanks to the addiitonal cores.

Depending on the specifics of the application you're using, and in consideration of a concentration on the rendering performance, it may be possible to achieve satisfactory results using a single procesor on the 850W power supply. My idea in this is that the processing of polygons is single-thread based.

I looked into Affinity Photo, but was unable to discern the basis of processing. I suspect it is quite GPU-based. That would be an important point of research.

In summary, enquire as the ability of every aplication you use as to the efficiency of core utilization. It is , of course , possible that VRay fro Rhino is quite affective in CPU + GPU utilizationm but that is not my experience with VRay for Sketchup. One of the problems I experienced with Vray in Sketchup was that the set up in RT rendering ran my 32GB z420 out of memory- a 3180 X 1260 needed 37+GB.  Also, learn more about the applications' ability to utilize dual GPU's. That knowledge, in my view, is the basis for all your upgrade decisions.

Re: the external PSU, I 'm not so concerned with the appearance as the complication of making the motherboard connections,  the z800 PSU is proprietary and it is possible that the main motherboard power connection has a different number of pins to a current standardized unit.  There is also the question of the length f the connecting cables.  Before considering that option further, look into the connectors and cabling.

An interesting project.  Do you have a website? It would be interesting to see an example of a spherical image.

BambiBoomZ

[Prettypicgirl]

Hi everybody.

Thanks for giving this a lot of thought.

Vray 3.6 for Rhino  uses all CPU cores (incl. logical cores) & combines this with using all available CUDA GPU cores.
No need for SLI.
Therefore no real point in going single CPU.
A CPU processor upgrade might be another option but I think I will skip that one and buy a Z820 in 1-2 years time.
The Z820 has the option of higher powered processors & PC-E 3.0
Thats also the reason why I do not want to spend big money now on an internal power unit upgrade for the Z800.

Primary train of thought is to buy 1 or 2 1080 cards now, which can be moved to an Z820 in 1-2 years time.
The cheapest version to power these two card efficiently is the external ATX psu. Provided I get it to work.
That way I do not push the internal power unit to the max either, which would be the case in the solution with internal upgrades.

The cabeling will be done in a way that  "physical pull-resistance" and voltage drop is not an issue.
reasonably short large diameter cables & plenty of cable ties.
No need for additional crimps. Checked that already.
I have still card openings in the back panel free which I will use to route the cables.
The PSU will get semi permanently attached at the Z800 chassis so no risk of pulling on the cables.

The PSU is standing right behind the Z800. It will collect no less or more dust than the Z800.

Yes, the Z800 has proprietory cabeling, but the pins are available. See here:

http://andybrown.me.uk/2014/11/01/z800/

I suspect that pin 8 and a ground pin on  the main power supply connector of the motherboard will supply the necessary "power good" signal for the external ATX PSU. Still I am in contact with Andy regarding confirmation on this.
There will be no other signals going to the external PSU.
Alternatevly I was hoping to get the signal from the memory power connector which is better accessible, but I already suspect that will not work.

Regarding 360 degree image I'll sent you a link as PM, the finalised tours are proprietory to my clients so I do not want to post them here.

Thanks again to all of you.

If I get it to work I will let you know. Might be a couple of weeks though.

Best regards,

Pretty