Z640 cannot fit or power a second GTX1070 card for SLI. Should I move it all into a Z840?

[MacTheSteve]

I've got very slow video renders on my Z640 with a single GTX1070 GRAPHICS CARD AND 64GB RAM. As I understand, the Z640 cannot fit a second video card or support SLI. And the power supply cannot be upgraded because of the proprietary PSU form.  I'm interested to know if there is a work around for this.

If not, is it possible to move all of the internal hardware from the Z640 into a Z840 if I can find one? Will this permit an additional graphics card, SLI  & enough power? (2x SSDs, 2x regular hard drives, 3 monitors)

Thanks for any insights!

[DGroves]

moving from a z640 to a z840 may not actually do what you want, it really depends on the software your use and how said software is configured if you provide those details we might be able to offer some suguestions

[MacTheSteve]

Thanks - video producer for over 20 years. The software is properly configured. My question is concerning the hardware as listed.

[DGroves]

I di not ask if your software config settings were correct, i asked what software you used and how said software was configured , is it setup for RAW footage, post prossing, editing, and so on, since you don't want to provide this, i will not be able to provide any help/suguestions other than to say go read the HP quickspec info for the z840 and decide for yourself

[Skylarking · Accepted solution]

I haven't looked into the later Zx40 series workstations but they are likely in the same boat as the earlier series workstations where SLI/Crossfire didn't always work as expected. I'd guess the problem people had with SLI/Crossfire seemed to stem from SLI/Crossfire licensing issues which is somewhat undefined and likley hiden behind NDA's.

IIUC, after reading public info on the www, for consumer graphics cards the SLI/Crossfire license was usually bundled with the chipset used. Thus mobo vendors paid the SLI/Crossfire tax by using the licensed chipset and all worked fine (with consumer graphics cards).

But our workstations use different chipsets to those in the consumer world, so unless a SLI/Crossfire tax was paid, you are likley to find that SLI/Crossfire simply didn't work with consumer graphics cards and their drivers...

However, with the use of expensive professional grade grahics cards (quadro or firepro) there was some hope that a workstation would function with such SLI/Crossfire setups. But how the tax was paid is unclear, so to be sure it works you'd need to check if a specific workstation was SLI/Crossfire certified as such. In these cases, i'd guess the licensing was handled a little differently to that of the consumer grade cards (maybe not chipset based).

NVidia has a page here that clearly indicates which pro cards work in SLI for the Zx40. Likley AMD have a similar page.

(This also implies that graphics cards power needs can be met by an appropriate HP power supply on such workstations, either via two auxilary power connector or via a double adapter)

So, your problem may be that you are using cheaper consumer grade cards whereas HP and NVidia wants you to spend big $$ on pro cards, liley so they can save some few $ on chipset licenses that the much cheaper consumer boards can handle without concern...  go figure...