Best gpu for Hp Z420 with Xeon e5-1620 vs cpu

[nicrusk01]

Best gpu for Hp Z420 with Xeon e5-1620 vs cpu? what cards would be best to add to make a FAH workstation?

[PaulTV]

That CPU was introduced over 9 years ago. It may not be fast enough to feed the latest and greatest GPUs. I certainly would not want to spend like $500,= (let alone a couple grand for a RTX 3090) for a workstation that old. I'd guess an nVidia GTX 10x0 for a decent price (possibly second-hand) would be something to consider, emphasis on 'guess'. Chances are others with more hardware experience with regards to folding will disagree though.

[psaam0001]

Right now (for basic folding), you would be good to go with something like the GTX 1050ti from MSI (https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-gtx- ... 6814137054).

Yes, it will block a slot (as most of the newer cards will). But it's a solid performer that I've got running on my Fedora Desktop right now (and gives me around 350K points a day). But 2 of them will still allow your PSU to continue providing a sufficient amount of power to other components.

Paul

[bikeaddict]

I was running GTX 1660 Super and 1660 Ti cards in Z420s for a year and they performed well. I've since upgraded to Z440 machines and E5-2690 V4 Xeons. I was running E5-2667 V2 and E5-2690 V2 CPUs that I got cheap off eBay. Note that you need a newer motherboard with the 2013 boot block to use Xeon V2 CPUs. Mine also had the 600W power supply with a 6-pin PCI-e cable that was used with a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter for the higher power GPUs. This PSU is rated to deliver 18A or 216W on the PCI-e cable, plus with 75W from the slot you could run some pretty high power GPUs. It could also be used with a SATA to 8-pin adapter.

See GreenPCGamers for details on upgrading HP Z workstations: https://www.youtube.com/c/GreenPCGamerscom/videos

BTW my Z420 workstations are for sale if anyone is near Iowa.

[MeeLee]

The CPU is a server CPU, which was way ahead of any desktop CPU at it's time.
It has 40 PCIE 3.0 lanes, and it runs 4 cores/8 threads at 3.6-3.8Ghz.
That means the fastest GPU the CPU could feed is probably an RTX 3080 or RTX 3090.
What may be a different issue is Bios compatibility.
Some people have ran GTX 1650 Super GPUs on old bioses without problems.
I know most older Bios chips can run GTX 1050, 1060, 1070, and 1080/1080Ti without problems.
Your limitation may be this prior generation, or GTX 1600 series (1650/1650 Super, 1660, 1660Ti).
I've ran a few older boards and they did not recognize an RTX GPU. Not the 2060, nor anything higher.

My recommendation is to buy an RTX 2060 to RTX 2080Ti with free return, and see if it works.
If it is not recognized, return, and get a 1650 Super to 1660Ti.
Stay clear of the standard 1650, since it's much slower.

The good thing is that your CPU has 40 PCIE lanes, so you can more than likely support up to 8 GPUs at PCIE 3.0 x4 lane speeds, which is about all you need for a 1650 Super - 1660Ti.

[appepi]

It seems there are very few posts about Z440s, so I add my experiences here for general info. I found similar posts helpful in the past and this info represents my take-home messages from a lot of scattered reading on the net. I start by noting that power requirements and safety are key points for me, since my devices run unattended at off-peak electricity hours, ie overnight, and I don't want them setting off smoke alarms while I'm asleep. I have a bunch of elderly hardware, all of which had a trial of folding in 2020, but only some of which does in 2022. Currently there are 5 x HP Z600s (Donors Z601-Z605), 3 x HP Z800s (Donors Z802, Z803, Z805), and 3 x HP Z440 (Donors Z441-Z443). To fit the cases without modifications, you need a "Turbo" model GPU (card depth no more than 113 mm). I no longer use CPU's for folding since it is way too expensive, slow, hot, and generally inconvenient for time-limited usage since CPU jobs and GPU jobs rarely finish together). However, when I did so in 2020, I used HP performance Adviser to assign the client a suitable set of cores to keep temperatures down around 75 deg C.

My Z600s have a 650W PSU and offer 1 x 6pin PCIe (75W) auxiliary power for a GPU. This suits the ASUS Turbo GTX 1060 (6GB) in Z603 that ran 24/7 for much of 2020 and racked up >100M points. You can also steal another 75W from SATA power and use a 2x6 --> 1x8 adapter. This suits the ASUS Turbo GTX 1070 (8GB) in Z602. These are my only active Z600 donors at present. They all have 2 x Xeon X5660 6-core GPU's and mostly 48GB of RAM.] Note that running X56xx CPU's means that older Zx00 models with the earlier motherboards limited to X55xx CPUs may be different.

My Z800s have the 1250W PSU (on 240V in AU, 1100W for US) and offer as standard 2x6 pin (2x 75W) auxiliary power. [There is also a variant that offers 3 x PCIe 6 pin - for installation of the harness in a Z840 see The Art of Server channel on Youtube.] I use a 2x6-pin --> 8pin "Teamprofit" adapter from Amazon, since the wiring is rated and you draw your 150W safely, This suits the ASUS Turbo GTX 1080 in Z805, and the MSI Aero (made for Dell) 1080 in Z802). It also suits ASUS Turbo RTX up to 2060 Super. Z803 has 2x Xeon X5675 6-core CPU's. Z805 is mainly my backup device with just 1 x Xeon X5620 but 6x4TB NAS drives in RAID10. [Z802 has 2x X5690 6-coreCPUs and 192GB of RAM and as the top of the Zx00 line it gets to rest these days. Also a lot of RAM means a lot of wasted heat.]

This Zx00 series have 2xPCIe2 (x16) expansion slots, plus others. I generally use the second one for a LSI-9261-8i or LSI-9240-81 "Raid on a chip" card /HBA to upgrade from native SATA 2 to SATA3 for SSD's or RAID arrays. There is little or no difference (in Folding performance) with these PCIe3 GPUs in PCIe2.

I have 3x Z440, they all have the larger 700W power supplies (as against the 525W version) ) and like the Z800s offer 2x 6-pin PCIE (75W each) as additional power. They are all running 1 x ASUS Turbo GTX 2060 (6GB). I do not run at full power since improvements in Folding performance over 70% are minimal. I use ASUS GPU Tweak to set a temperature limit to 70 deg C and linked to power. This applies to the GTX 10xx cards also.

The two Z40s bought in 2020 (Donors Z441 and Z442) have 6-core Xeon 1650 v3 and run W10 21H2. The one I bought this week (Donor Z443) has a 4-core Xeon 1620 v3 and arrived with W11 installed. Though the Zx40 series and below are not considered by HP or Windows as suitable for W11, it seems to run OK and folds OK at present. I expect that sooner or later a W11 upgrade will kill it, so I will be making a W10 version also.

In Z442 I am experimentally running a "Cablematters" 6 --> 8 pin adapter from Amazon, pending arrival of more 2x6 ->8 "Teamprofit" adapters. Wires do not feel warm at the power levels I am using, but safe is better than burning the house down so 2x6 --> 8 and rated cabling is the way to go, I think. On this basis any card needing more than 1x8pin seems unsafe to me, so a RTX 2060 SUPER is tops.

The Z440s also have a second PCIe3 16 slot. In Z441 and Z442 I use this for a Samsung 970 EVO NVME boot drive (which only needs x4). I aim to do so in Z443 also, In addition, I have other NVME boot drives for Ubuntu Mate when I need to run it. I haven't tried folding with Ubuntu, but others on the forum have stories to tell about this. The Zx00s can be made to boot from SATA3, but not from NVME - at least, not by someone at my pay grade. Supposedly the Zx20 series might if one is lucky. But frankly, I don't notice much difference in practical use.

When Folding, I set up a series of windows so I can see how things are going at a glance. HD Sentinel pro tracks all my disk temperatures on the bottom line. HWInfo tracks Maximum CPU Core temps, overall CPU % usages, and total GPU power, on the bottom line. The browser Fah client display is a window on the left, GPU Tweak II or III and Fah Control log on the right. Thus I can leave the screens off and just check from time to time.

Tedious for most to read, but presumably helpful to fans of the marvellous Z-series beasts.

[bikeaddict]

There are three Z440 workstations in my folding farm. A couple are using RTX 3070 and RTX 3070 Ti GPUs that require 2x 8-pin power. They are connected with a TeamProfitcom dual 6-pin to 8-pin adapter and a dual SATA to 8-pin adapter. The 700W PSUs are rated to deliver 18A on the 12-volt rails, which is up to 216W each, so I don't worry about burning the house down.

The CPUs in mine are Xeon E5-2690 v4 14-core, decently priced on eBay now. They are pretty slow at folding, so I gave up on that. They were previously used for World Community Grid until their extended migration outage and are now on QuChemPedIA@home.

The BIOS has a minimum fan speed setting that can be used to bump up the cooling to the CPUs run cooler, at the cost of a bit more noise.

I only use SATA drives since they're plenty fast and cheap.

Fedora Linux is the OS and I monitor folding and BOINC remotely, or SSH in to look at hardware stats or server logs.

[appepi]

Thanks bikeaddict, this is really useful information. I had tried unsuccessfully to find a specification for the 12V rail connections on a Z440, but tried Google again after your post with more luck - see https://www.compeve.com/index.php?main_ ... s_id=13768. The full list is:

Manufacturer Part #: 719795-004
Maximum Power: 700
Output Voltage: +12VCpu0 @ 18A / +12VCpu2 @ 18A / +12Vm @ 18A / +12Vb @ 18A / +12Vs @ 18A / +12Vd @ 18A
+12VG1 @ 18A / +12VG2 @ 18A (with this last pair being the two 6-pin PCIe connectors)

I then went on to check out my adaptors and their wiring and pinouts. But that's a long story and not specific to Z440. I note however that my "Cable Matters" 6-pin to 8-pin adapters state a power limit of 75W despite seeming to have the same wiring (18 AWG) and (apparent) number of circuits (3) as my "TeamProfitcom" 2x 6-pin --> 1x8-pin, which says nothing about any power limit at all. But 3 circuits of 18 AWG should be fine to carry 6A each according to various websites.

The net effect for me is (sadly) to change a perceived power limit on my GPU aspirations to a very realistic $$$ limit!!!