25/11/2019
WHY THE HP Z820 ??
This page is dedicated to providing correct and precise instructions for installing three Nvidia GPUs into used HP Z820 Workstations for 3D rendering artists and professionals. There was so much non-sense and internet garbage on this topic, I decided to dedicate a FB page to settle it.
Why the HP Z820? Simply put the HP Z820 saves money. If you intend to render in iRay or Redshift or similar RT render engines that use CUDA cores, you are really after the GPUs and the more GPUs the better. The consensus is that three GPUs is a minimum for professional work and your PC. The HP Z820 at the time of inception was a professional, industry level workstation, gas, oil, geology, medical and entertainment industries using the Z820. As time marched on the Z820 succumb to the fate of all computers and grew obsolete. Once the HP Z820 became "old generation" countless corporations and business dumped all their new and used Z820s onto the second hand PC market. As the HP 2820 was built for professional use, many features remain powerful. Quad channel memory, 1100W PSU, BMW designed cooling fan array, PCIe slots, dual E5 Xeons capable of pushing 4.0Ghz and the ability to add 500GB of DDR3 1866Mhz RAM. Yes, the memory choice is limited to DDR3, but 1866 is more than enough speed and the HP Z820 will accept 2667 version 2, water cooled XEON processors. The V2 2667 dual Xeons will turbo up to 4.0Ghz on a single core. C4D and Adobe products use a single core for many operations. For this reason, I strongly recommend the 2667 water cooled CPU as it offers the best of both worlds. A reasonable core count at 16 cores total, yet offers single core single threaded CPU speeds of up to 4.0Ghz. As of 2020 this is not the fastest CPU speed, but for a practically ancient processor chip, 4.0 Ghz is still remarkable. Again, my goal was bulk cores and bulk GPUs to render frame, not seeking out the absolute fastest single core CPU on the market. With this HP Z820 I had put together via workstation4u.com from Germany, I assembled the fastest HP Z820 possible. Keep in mind, each piece represents a possible bottleneck, so if you want the fastest possible Z820 hack, then you need to replicate each part listed in this FB site here.
With the V2 watercooled Xeon 2667 at 3.30Ghz base clock you will have the CPUs needed to handle three Nvidia 1080ti or 2080ti GPUs. You will however, need to hack this Z820 slightly for GPU power connectivity management and this is the PRIMARY reason for this FB page.
There are several flavors of the old HP Z-series. The HP Z 620, Z 800, Z 820 and Z 840. The Z-620 is too old. The Z-800 works well with fewer than 3 GPU, but why get the Z-800 when for slightly more can get Z-820 which features the Version 2.0 Motherboard, thus the current PCIe and Xeon5 compatible board. The Z-840 is faster but costly. The HP Z-820 strikes a nice balance. Buying the Z-820 be certain to get the version 2.0 motherboard and version 2.0 Xeons, such as the Xeon 2667 V2 8 core at 3.30 Ghz (dual core setup with water cooling)
Comparing against new computers, I found a newer machine with very close specs to be in the cost range of 9,000.00$ (not necessarily including all the GPUS...) whereas a used Z820 with 1080ti cards purchased through pay-pal for a warranty via Ebay, cost me about $5000.00 so essentially a savings of four thousand dollars.
So if you own a Z820 or are just curious, click on the pictures below and read the the comments next to each photo for the explanations and instructions.
