Z400 compute option in BIOS bricks (again) the system

[2-Xite]

After many hours of trying I have to share that it was not possible to repair the system. I can not hide my disappointment…

It seems, that it even not possible to enter the BIOS-mode on this Z400 model under the 6-beeps error… The computer continues with beeps independent of what key-combination I’m using, it seems like the system is on self-lock...

BTW, as I remember, I did not turn ‘compute’ option ‘on’ the lowest 2 PCI-slots, but putting a VGA PCE card in it does not help the trick...

The advice to replace the main board with a used one is not a problem, but I can not use it as a work-computer anymore, because such MoBo is not from a trustful source and I’m afraid that the hardware could be compromised, especially on W10.

What do you think, is it an good idea to look for another z400-owner and ask him to make a BIOS config.txt (and .bin file) with HP BIOS Configuration Utility (BCU), so that I can try to load that .bin in to the BIOS? The re-flashing itself (with the crisis-jumper on) goes smooth and I have during this moments some video until the cold-reset.

Thank you for a little support.

[DGroves]

your fear of motherboard modifications regarding viruses is very much unfounded, it takes nation level hacking skills to possibly develop and install such a mod on a motherboard and at this point in time it's just theory ,.............nobody has any evidence that this has been done yet

a crysis  bios reflash will reflash the bios,....but it will not change the current compute settings as far as i know

the pci video card MUST BE A LEGACY card (legacy cards do not have/use UEFI) you need a older pre 7 series nvidia card

any of the nvidia 6000 series is pre uefi

[Pcdiy1366]

i know,but with my workstation reseating cpu and ram resets the bios.

[DGroves]

reseating the cpu/ram will not and i repeat not reset the bios.....................hardware impossibility

removing/reseating ram will however usually cause the system to retrain the memory on startup,   IE-re detect ram speed/ram amount and this process will cause the system to reboot at least once upon system powerup

[2-Xite]

Thank you for adding some new info.

I’ve put many, many days to trying to reanimate the computer, but after all I’ve decided to look for another main board, also because the broken one is from version 1 (4 dimm).

On internet I’ve found a used version 2. and I’ve recently replaced the broken one with the newer. Yes, it still hurts ... . How its possible that HP does not support this model from such recovery-options as like z420 ?!

In any case, the computer is broad to its previous state, the W10 started up..., but my main (music score editing) program still did crashing even after I did installed the early mentioned AMD video-drivers! So, I had to spend another few hours for testing, trying etc., but after all I decided to make a clean install of W10.

Right now the system seams to work, but I do not know for how long.

Just before to complete this long and unpleasant story, I wish to know how people make above mentioned CPU-refreshes? Is that just removing the CPU and rebooting the system? Its absolutely not the case that I’m going to test something else, but I only wish to learn and to get better experienced with these kind of bugs.

Thank you gentlemen for support!

[DGroves]

all of the "Z" workstations that have the same bios compute option will be bricked if you enable compute on all of the available pci/pci-e slots, the z420 is not immune to this

i suspect your music program is the culprit due to it's copy protection or how it installs that caused issues with the board swap requiring a full reinstall of it's software along with windows 10

yes, usually a cpu swap will not cause issues, but again i've seen some programs that tie themselves to the installed hardware (usually for copy protection) which dislike hardware changes

sometimes windows will not report the new cpu core specs in the main info page, even though it has correctly detected the new cpu core count in apps like task manager