Xeon CPU upgrade

[GenesisXeon]

Thank you very much for the reply

I  looked up on ebay for the Xeon 1660V2 and their availability is very low. I found maybe 
one or two overpriced offers from OEM  dealers. 

I think i will go for the 1650 V2 and overclock it a bit, this cpu has also
the best price value : 80-90€it  costs on ebay. 

As a cooler i use the stock air cooler and i changed all the system fans 
to noctua ones, because they are so silent and still fast with maximum of 2000RPM.
The HP stock fans were horribly loud, maybe the most awful fans i ever seen in a system. 

Th HP Water coolers availability here in europe is also very bad, maybe i will try to use an 
inexpensive regular all in one water cooling. I have some unused space at the front where i could mount 
the radiator and drill some mounting holes. 

One Question: I'm not very experienced with overclocking, but i wanna know if something could 
get broken or overheating while overclocking, since the mainboard is not made for this aspect ?


But thanks for your helpful tips, even i'm late to this topic. 

[SDH]

The 1650 v2 is a 130W processor.  We have a forum friend Brian1965 who posted earlier in this thread.  Both he and Bambi are experienced in the XTU overclocking process, and Brian posted a HowTo document in one of his earlier posts that you should go find and print out.  The older version of Intel XTU that Bambi is using and likes is pretty easy to find and download.

Regarding a less expensive option on cooling..... I have posted in here about use of the heatsink from the Z440 (also used in the single-processor Z640) which has almost double the cooling fin surface area compared to the stock 130W Z420/Z620 heatsink.  The Z440/Z640 heatsink also has 33% more large cooling tubes (4 instead of 3).  You can take the HP fan off your original and shift it over to the Z440/Z640 larger heatsink.... 4 screws, perfect fit, and the 5-wire fan plug comes with that transfer fits perfectly by default.  The stock ZX40 fan has a 6-wire plug but still is really only a 4-wire fan and you can convert it over to a 5-wire plug if you have a blank and know how to transfer the wires and snip off the 6th (ground jumper) wire.  Noctua PWM fans are nice and slow to begin with and if you add the standard HP PWM braking to them they go even slower and cool even less well.  Too much of a good thing.

Regarding fan noise...... there are some older HP 92x25mm PWM fans that can run a bit slower and quieter I could advise on, but I don't advise to use the Noctua 92x25mm pwm fans on your processor cooler especially if you will be overclocking, for the reason above.  If you don't yet have a front fan you should.... that does contribute and can be virtually silent.  If you don't have the Z620 memory fan cooler/air flow shroud you should get one of those too if you're going to overclock.  That fits perfectly over the larger Z440/Z640 heatsink mod, and those are pretty cheap and easy to find on eBay.

Finally, I'm liking the new HP Performance Advisor free utility software for seeing all the attached fan speeds, and there are other utilities for monitoring CPU temps.... Core Temp is a free one our favorite HP workstation engineer recommended, and it is actively supported with the latest version having come out 1/8/19.  It also has a couple of nice "Add Ons" that include a temp graphing utility.  HERE

[SDH]

The how-to posts from Brian and Bambi are in the thread  HERE.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/z420-z620-overcklo...

I'll eventually find the time to overclock my Z620 v2 build with the E5-1660 V2 and get some temp values with the stock Z620 heatsink/fan and the Z440/Z640 one for comparison.

[GenesisXeon]

Thanks for your helpful replies 

I'm using those Fans in my Sytsem as CPU and also PSU fan.
https://noctua.at/de/nf-a9-pwm 
Glad the PSU fan has a 4 pin connector, so it's easy to swap them out. 

In terms of cooling power: it's alsmost the same with the stock fan, 
but i don't have to worry about damaging my eardrums anymore. 

My Z420 comes without automatic fan speeds. 
I had to adjust the Fan speed in the BIOS, which looks like this

Fan Speed: █ █ █ ▒ ▒ ▒

and i set it to the highest. 

The 4 Pin Fans work fine on the 5 Pin connector, also no complaints at booting up. 
Only the missing RAM Fan shows up, but after pressing F1 the system boots normally. 

I'm using HWinfo for viewing my temperatures and the RAM Fan for example was mostly pure nonsense. 
Because the temperature of the RAM Modules stay the same as with the fan. 

As Case fans i use cheaper ones from bequiet! , they are pretty silent but have good airflow. 

The Z640 Heatsink here is also very unavailable. 
I only see one used offer on eBay from great britain for whopping 103€ and that is too expensive.

I will consider buying this for around 60€ new air cooler from noctua. 
https://noctua.at/de/nh-d9dx-i4-3u
It has also the option adding a second fan, which should be great. 

I'm really allergic towards loud desktop computers, they have to be silent. 
I also added noise canceling mats to the side panel and rubber things on the hard drives etc. 
I got the HP Z420 from my old workplace because they swapped to newer Z6 G4's or how they called. 

PS: the hp stock water cooler looks pretty weird. Usually the radiator has to be mounted to the case walls to dispatch the heat directly out of it and on the HP one this all is slammed in one block. 

Thank you very much for the overclocking tips in the link. They really helped me out.