Z800: From watercooled to aircooled?

[Z440Roger]

I have a Z800 with dual Xeon X5670 watercooled processors. It came with the watercooler unit from factory. I am planning to remove the watercooling unit and replace it with two performance heatsinks, 463991-001. Now the prices for heatsinks are better than they were for a couple of years ago.

Question:

Are the BIOS aware of that there is watercooling installed today and will throw error messages when just replacing the watercooling unit with the proper performance heatsinks? Over the years i have not found any instance in the BIOS that indicates one setting for watercooling and another setting for air cooling. But i do know that the mobo do throw errors if one for example add a non-HP chassi fan.

[SDH]

Those are 95W max TDP processors... 

I've read in the past that there is nothing special to do when you convert from HP watercooling to Performance heatsinks/fans in these workstations. DGroves has used these much more than we have.

The Performance vs Mainstream heatsink/fan is bigger both in cooling fin surface area, number of heat tubes, and size of fan.

The way a motherboard knows a Performance heatsink/fan is attached is by the wiring at the plug end. The workstation has a 5 pin header. Both the Performance and Mainstream fans use the same white 5-hole plug end. The difference is that for the Performance one there is a ground jumper wire from hole 1 to hole 5... easy to spoof with a mainstream heatsink/fan and less than $0.01 USD of thin wire. That would be unwise in general but I've done it for some light testing while I was waiting for a Performance one to arrive.

Of interest literally all of the Z400s I've seen have a Performance heatsink/fan present but it is of a different shape than for the Z600/Z800 because that is a single processor workstation only, and there is more room to play with in there.

[DGroves]

the only thing that needs to be done is to make sure the fan setting in the bios is set to the sec or 3rd mark if you have several pci-e cards installed, other than that it's a easy swap

a quick way to id the performance heatsinks is to look for 3 heatpipes, the low power ones only have two heatpipes

also while the 820/z840 heatsinks are interchangeable

the z800 can only use the  z800 specific ones, no other ones will fit inside the black air shroud duct 

[Z440Roger]

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@SDH wrote:

Those are 95W max TDP processors... 

 Yes, i had forgot that. Thanks for refreshing my memory! 🙂

That means that the much cheaper 463990-001 is the way to go for me. I have no plans of upgrading the CPU's in the future. Since you have used both, do they differ much in terms of loudness. Since the performance cooler has a larger fan it has the potential of being quiter at normal fan speeds. 

[DGroves]

the performance units are preferred, as they will cope with the sudden heat bursts that cpu's do,... better than the low power heatsinks due to the better thermals, however i would not go nuts looking for them if the price is  to high compared to the low power heatsinks

[Z440Roger]

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@DGroves wrote:

the performance units are preferred, as they will cope with the sudden heat bursts that cpu's do,... better than the low power heatsinks due to the better thermals, however i would not go nuts looking for them if the price is  to high compared to the low power heatsinks

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The performance fans costs often more than the double price or more compared to the standard cooler so i am leaning to the standard cooler. I bought my Z800 in 2010 directly when HP released them with 6-core processors and used it as my video editing rig for years. Nowdays it wont do any heavy workload as it did back in the days, so i think the standard cooler will work without issues. But i would like the performance cooler since the fan is bigger and thus hopefully not as loud. I´ll keep on searching at the moment iow.

The Z800 is a noisy machine in general. It was marketed as very quiet and the watercooler should make it even quiter HP said but it actually made it even more noisy. I used to sell Z400/Z600/Z800 so i did compare them after i bought my Z800. It was  random, one Z800 could be very noisy while another with the same spec six months later were quiter. (and vice versa...)