Z400 Aftermarket Upgrades

[Duncan77]

"I bridged it to computer chasis and BIOS stopped complaining."

Can you explain this or show a photo? I installed an Artic Freezer 13 Limited Edition connected to the 5 pin with a 4 pin connector, most right and running 13-15 C cooler than the Z400 (v2, 6 dimm slots) performance cooler. But always have to press F1 on boot.

Thanks in advance,

Duncan.

[SDH]

Duncan.... it was me who figured out how to "spoof" the HP motherboards to think they had a "Performance" heatsink/fan in place rather than the lower rated "Mainstream" heatsink/fan.  It is actually all done via the fan's wiring, and is very simple.

Having said that I'd recommend you buy a used HP Performance Z400 heatsink/fan off eBay and use that.  Those are very common and cheap because the Z400 usually came with a higher wattage processor and thus came with the Performance heatsink/fan.  Or, lets say you have a non-HP heatsink and a good enough fan to know your processor will be protected enough.  Then use this approach:

Get a ground wire connected to pin 5 of the 5-pin header on the motherboard that the heatsink's fan is supposed to plug onto.  The way HP does this is they have a nice 4-wire PWM fan carefully chosen to be balanced with the built in motherboard PWM fan speed controller.  Pin 1 - 4 are conventional for a PWM fan... 1 is ground, 2 is full 12VDC, 3 is motor RPM info back to the motherboard, 4 is PWM control signals from motherboard out to the motor.  If you have a "Mainstream" heatsink/fan the 5th hole in the fan's plug is empth.  If you have an official "Performance" heatsink/fan there is a short ground jumper from the little metal connector inside the first hole in the white fan plug, and that runs over to the 5th hole in the plug.

The idea is that if the motherboard sees ground on pin 5 it believes there is a Performance heatsink/fan attached.  If no ground on pin 5 then it assumes it is a Mainstream heatsink/fan.  The motherboard does not care where the ground connection comes from...... single wire from the metal side of the case over to attach only to pin 5 would be fine.  Then, pins 1-4 are populated by a standard PWM fan's plug.... you'd need to shave off some plastic ridges to do that.

Now you see why I only use the official HP Performance heatsinks/fans.... they're engineered to work as HP engineers wanted, and the plugs are perfect.  You can use a Performance wattage processor or a lower wattage processor with the Performance heatsink/fan, no problem.  I personally don't like grounding pins from the motherboard to the chassis, and at about 21.00 USD for this unit why risk your workstation?  What you want is 463981-001.... look on eBay.  Here's a picture of the fan plug end:

[Duncan77]

Hi SDH,

Thanks a lot for your reply and your solution! I have a friend who is an electrician/engineer by trade so I will ask him to make a nice 5 pin connector for me or if possible connect te 5 pin connector of my performance fan to the Artic Freezer 13 Limited Edition.

Grounding to the chasis is not really my style. I had (have) the performance cooler but it made a kind of ratteling noise. Also the performance cooling fan is aluminium and the Limited edition of the Artic Cooler 13 is Nickel plated.

The CPU (W3565) runs up to 13 degrees celsius (!!!) cooler under full stress than the performance fan. Also in Windows I can run the cpu in Windows on full stress 100% (like encoding) without the fan speeding up and slowing down every few seconds. I used to set the WIndows Energy Performance scheme of the CPU to a maximum of 80% to prevent the fan throttling.

I wil also test this with a second hand Xeon W3680 and IC Graphite thermal pad in stead of cooling paste. I expect it to run 1-3 degrees celsius warmer but after a 13 degree celsius decrease that should be no problem.

Thanks again!

Duncan.

[SDH]

It is good to know that specific cooler does so well and fits amongst all the other motherboard parts.  And, I assume, you can put the case cover on normally without having to cut holes in it!

A tip.... the HP PWM braking is quite strong and they use PWM fans that normally would run quite fast without it.    Thus, if you put in a PWM fan that would run relatively slow and quiet without PWM braking (like many of the Noctua fans) when that fan sees the strong PWM braking via pin 4 it will run too slowly.  The benefit of using a PWM fan is to control the fan speed via BIOS or via the motherboard's PWM programming.  If your processor runs cool all the time then you may not need any need to speed up.

Finally, there is a BIOS option in many of the HP workstations to turn off F1 prompts with system-recoverable errors.  That is one way to work around having to push F1 every boot/restart.

[SDH]

I just checked on this Z400 here at home.... it is our "library" workstation with an X5690 processor.  There is no F1 prompt disable option in its BIOS unlike many of the other HP workstations.

The Z400 "Performance" fan if I recall correctly is a 92x92x25mm fan and its fan label is facing the heatsink fins.  You may have one with bad bearings.  If your nice non-HP heatsink is using the same size of fan you might want to look on the HP fan's label and search for a replacement.  These HP fans seem to last a very long time, and if you could swap in one of those to your heatsink you likely would be good to go on all levels, with proper balance and wiring.

Your heatsink is very nice, has more heat tubes and fin surface area than the stock HP Performance fan for the Z400 so that might be the ideal solution.

[Duncan77]

The Artic Freezer 13 Limited Edition sits perfectly without any modification. The plastic clips do not work but I could reuse the screws from the performance cooler. 

Duncan. 

[leduclongmaster]

hello i have questions. Can anyone help me? I have z400 hp and I tried plugging in a 470 rx card but could not run. Please see the picture and help me. only when i plugged in the new k600 card to show the rx470 on the system, but the wire connector from rx470 with the screen cannot be displayed, only one black