Z820 Fan Speed Control?

[Scoobis]

I'm looking to see if someone from HP or someone with some technical knowledge can give some information to help us all out.  can get the information on the PWM controllers for the fans?

There has been ongoing set of posts about cooling / fan sppeds on the Z820,  some people "think" that the fan speed doesn't increase as load/temperature increases on the Z820,  but it definitely does, however,  not at a rate most enthusiasts are accustomed to and nowhere near the higher fan speeds the system is capable of.   It is well suited for its original purpose and meets the design goals of keeping it quiet.

Since a lot of these systems are now ending up in the hands of enthusiasts who enjoy pushing them very hard at times, and even upgrading them etc,  we can max out the default ability for the system to cool itself with the built-in thermal fan speed ramping.  The workaround is to increase the idle fan speed in bios, and although that will keep the system cool,  it makes it always noisy all the time, which is really not necessary most of the time.

There are 3rd party tools that can monitor temps and load and adjust fan speeds but, in order to use those we need more information that does not seem readily available.  if we can get the information on the PWM controllers for the fans so we can set up those programs, that would be great.  I am assuming there on the SMBus or ISA bus.  This would let us set up programs like fanspeed to fill the gap.

Thanks!

[Scoobis]

anyone have the info on the fan speed controllers?

[BambiBoomZ]

Scoobis,

As far as I'm aware, HP workstations - and other proprietary makers, tend to limit the modifications to fan controls.  I believe that neither software such as Speedfan nor hardware fan controllers can control the fan speeds through PWM as is used in gaming.  The only control I know in zX20 systems is selecting the number of asterisks in BIOS > Advanced > Thermal. I have occasionally set that to two or three asterisks for special occasions- rendering of something, but generally, the noise level is quite high.

I consider myself an "enthusiast" HP z-series owner and have succeeded in some modeifications to a z620, but the range is limited.  This z620 runs a Xeon E5-1680 v2  8-core overclocked to 4.3GHz on all cores and is, uncovenetionally, cooled by a z420 liquid cooler.  As the single thread performance is still deficient; in search of 4.6GHz there is an Alphacool Eiswand external cooler waiting for installation. That has 6X 120MM fans in push/ pull and runs at a constant medium fan speed for effective cooling with minimal noise and doesn't require modifications to the case.  Our forum friend Brian1965 designed a custom external cooler and runs his z620 E5-1680 v2 @ 4.7Ghz.

This is cited so as to describe the ways in which circumvention of the workstation subsystems such as cooling control can be difficult and expensive. Workstations focus on ultra-reliability and because of that understandable protecting the users from themselves stance, the associated hardware categories- e.g., Xeon CPU's and Quadro GPU's are very unlikely to submit to overclocking. Fortunately, modern workstation CPU's are now available with a good supply of cores and high Turbo clock speeds- see the Xeon W-2145 -for $1,300) and the Quadro RTX 6000 is the fastest GPU in the World - for $6,300).  The workstation and gaming worlds are merging more every year.  There are a  surprising number of i9-9900K- the current fastest gaming CPU- systems using GPU's such as Quadro P4000 and I will bet you lunch that those users are running Solidworks or similar viewport 3D modeling.

BambiBoomZ

[Scoobis]

well if the information was known it could be controlled.. just looking for the data on the PWM controllers. it's not that it cant. it is that the information about it is not yet known.