Why can't slot 3 in the z440 be used for the Z Turbo Drive G2 as it meets the X4 spec?

[TwoMetreBill]

The HP Quickspecs document says slots 4, 5 and 3 in order of preference but no explanation of why. 

The HP Installation manual says slots 4 and 5 only. 

I would like to move it to slot 3 from slot 4, assuming that slot 4 supports "PCIe port bifurcation " but bifurcation is separate issue that I need to research. 

I have the 512GB Z Turbo Drive G2 installed in slot 4 as the boot drive, as it came from HP. 

[DGroves]

cooling is the major reasion, the z440 can support up to 3 of the turbo z cards at the same time

bifurcation is not supported on the z440, while the chipset is capable of this HP does not enable it in the bios

[TwoMetreBill]

Thanks for the info. Though I do not want to add additional Z card but rather just wanted to move the card to install a X8 card. Since bifurcation is not supported, that idea is history. New plan:

• Replace the Quadro K1200 with a RTX 2080 Blower (when the prices come down) in slot 2 & 3. As a blower card, if anything, cools the case, it should not cause any heating problems being placed next to the Z card. 
• Install a PCIe NVMe adapter card with a single Samsung 970 2TB Evo in slot 5. If there is too much heat, easy to epoxy a 120mm fan to the case blowing directly on the 2 cards. The magnetic bearing fans are extremely durable and not too pricey, usually double that of a ball bearing fan. 

Thanks again for your help,

-Bill 

[DGroves]

there are several options for multi SSD pcie cards, super micro makes a dual 8x pcie card (AOC-SLG3-2M2) where each ssd gets a 4x connection the card costs about 40.00 and is available form supermicro or amazon

much more expensive is the  Aplicata Quad M.2 at close to 500 + the cost of ssd's

https://www.amazon.com/Aplicata-Quad-NVMe-PCIe-Adapter/dp/B01MTU75X4

kingston also makes a quad ssd card under their enterprise section 1000.00 and up depending on storage size

all of the above do not require/use  bifurcation the two quad cards use Plex chips to do the nessary pcie lane magic

[TwoMetreBill]

Thanks but according to the specs, both cards require bifurcation . 

[DGroves]

the mfgr of the card does not state this since they use a PLX chip,  from where did you read the card specs? i suspect you are getting mixed up with their products, the older  pcie x8 card i linked to does not use bifurcation, the newer 16x card does

you can contact the card maker directly and ask them

http://www.aplicata.com/quattro-400/

https://www.amazon.com/Aplicata-Quad-NVMe-PCIe-Adapter/dp/B01MTU75X4

the kingston enterprise quad card i know for a fact does not use  bifurcation since we use them  on several servers

[BambiBoomZ]

TwoMetreBill,

Yes, the slot preference order for the Z Turbo Drive in a z420 and z620 is the same and for the same reason.  I use a Z Turbo M.2 256GB AHCI (Samsung SM951 AHCI)- on Slot 4. I tested it it in Slot 3 and it worked, but performance was almost  -15%.   

Regarding plans to RTX 2080: Of the 70,000+ HP 's tested on Passmark Performance Test, so far (26 Nov 18) there is not a single HP system listed using any version of RTX.   See the recent thread by forum friend Calaudude who eventually returned his RTX 2080:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/HP-Z620-with-singl...

This is not to say it will never work, as HP does have RTX GeForce and RTX Quadro options for new Z-G4 series, but that it's early days for RTX and there are no visible signs that HP is yet providing updated BIOS /Chipset driver to accommodate Turing cards for previous version workstations.  There are a very few Dell systems- perhaps 6 in total, using RTX with CPU's including back to Xeon E5-1650 and i7-4790 with RTX results, so it appears to be a matter of the manufacturer offering support.  Wait to see RTX results on previous version HPs and proceed carefully.   I'd thought to have an RTX 2070 eventually as I use ray-tracing rendering, but maybe it's not going to happen.

Blower Version GPU:  By the way, if you do buy an RTX, the blower version is the better choice as the fan is pushing the heated air out the back panel instead of upwards inside the case towards the CPU and memory. I had a very large MSI GTX 1070 Ti-Gaming X  2.4 slot height and had to use the Z Turbo in Slot 5.  That provided full full performance as that is the second x16 GPU slot. I now have a blower MSI Aero GTX 1070 Ti 1- slot height and that allows using the Z Turbo Slot 3.

BambiBoomZ

[TwoMetreBill]

Thanks for all the very useful information. My decision is to go with a Samsung 970 Evo 2tb Nvme in a pci-e slot for the Lightroom library; a Samsung 860 Evo 2tb SATA connected to a SATA3 port for GoogleDrive (just to get it off the hard drive; sometime in the future, upgrade the video card.

I'd like a card upgrade strictly for Lightroom as Nvidia upgrades have become rather unreliable for the K1200. I've learned to keep old drivers  as Windows updates occasionally include defective Quadro drivers.

Again  thanks to all for your assistance .

[DGroves]

i would recomend a usb 3.0 external portable 2.5 in  drive+enclosure for storing your archival files like the video drivers

you can get thes quite cheaplt depending on the drive capacity

[TwoMetreBill]

Everything on my machine is stored in 4 places: hard drive, GoogleDrive, internal 2nd hard drive, an external drive that is kept in a fire safe. Total storage: 30TB.

Well the C drive is no longer backed up since Microsoft broke their backup software (what, at least 10 times in the past 20 years) with the Fall 2018 update. This drive only has the OS and application installs.