Z840 PCIe3 Slot Query For NVMe Expansion Card

[SDH]

Good news!

Don't forget the second cpu heatsink's overhead fan... mounts above off of the heatsink just like with the first. You've probably seen this video:

https://youtu.be/QzEuIzUmgRs

About 10:18 in he forgot about that too. Easy fix. Those Z Vapor Coolers he's adding are nice but are really not necessary. If you want to splurge you might want 1 or 2 of those. You can mix the two types in one workstation.

Please keep us updated...it will be interesting.

[ooms]

Yup, I did forget the 2nd fan so thanks for pointing that out. It arrived yesterday and everything's upgraded now. Some thoughts on the upgrade:

1) PSU: I guess I must have already had the 1125w PSU in it so I now have a spare. Old: HP P/N 719799-002 New: HP P/N 719799-003. I really should have checked first and swapping the PSU was incredibly easy.

2) HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 NVME Quad Pro Adapter: What a breeze these are to work with. Put 4 x WD SN850x in them and I'm currently using them as individual drives under ESXi 7. ESXi was fresh installed on the first and working fine. A quick test from a VM installed on one of these shows this which I'm really happy with:-

hdparm -t --direct /dev/sda3
/dev/sda3:
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 12448 MB in 3.00 seconds = 4149.32 MB/sec

3) CPU & RAM: Adding the 2nd E5-2680 V4 and attaching a new heatsink was dead easy. I also increased the RAM to 256GB but was worried about the power draw but I'm very impressed.

Z840 with 1 x E5-2680 V4 128 GB RAM - power draw was ~100w at idle running ESXi 7

Z840 with 2 x E5-2680 V4 256 GB RAM - power draw was ~160w at idle running ESXi 7
Z840 with 2 x E5-2680 V4 256 GB RAM - power draw was 320w during inbuilt CPU Stress Test

Next I've got 4 x SSD DC S3610's which went into the 4 free bays on the Z840. Already flashed the board to IT Mode on the back of one of Art of Server's YouTube videos so the plan is to pass these through to a TrueNAS VM when I get around to building it.  Very annoyed ESXi 8 does not support my Mellanox ConnectX-3 10GbE SFP+ card so I'm stuck at ESXi 7 until I can buy a new card but was interesting to note both onboard 1GB NICs on the Z840 are recognised by ESXi 8 - was not expecting that. 

This upgraded Z840 will be replacing 3 x Z620 so the heat and power savings will eventually even out. Thanks again for the help!

[SDH]

Thanks for the update... I learned some valuable information from your work, also.