10/14/2017 0 Comments Download Driver Radeon Hd 6870 CoolerHacking the HP Z8. Xeon motherboard into a standard case. Hacking the HP Z8. Xeon motherboard into a standard case. Posted on Nov 1, 2. PCAbout four years ago now the company I work for were investing in some new servers for a project that we were working on and what turned up were quad LGA1. Xeons with support for up to 1. Gb of memory. In most cases two sockets were populated with Intel Xeon X5. CPUs, hex core devices with 1. Mb of cache memory. We ran Redhat Enterprise Linux on them and they were, and still are, extremely fast linux servers that could operate as physical boxes in our production environment or virtuals in development. I wanted one. I still want one. The latest PC gaming hardware news, plus expert, trustworthy and unbiased buying guides. I looked around and noticed that HP were doing a very similar board with two sockets and, crucially, it was packaged up into what looked like a normal PC tower case. And it was very expensive, much too expensive to justify forking out for one. Fast forward four years and times have changed. You can now pick up a brand new replacement motherboard for an HP Z8. So thats what I did, and here it is. Excitement quickly turned into a daunting realisation that I may have bitten off more than I could chew. The board is massive. It will not fit into any normal PC case, not even an EATX tower case. The mounting screws will not mate with any of the ATX holes in a motherboard tray. The large ATX power connector is non standard. In conclusion, the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 introduces more flexibility for display devices, especially where Eyefinity is used, plus it enables stereoscopic 3D. About four years ago now the company I work for were investing in some new servers for a project that we were working on and what turned up were quad LGA1366 socket. ASUS is a leading company driven by innovation and commitment to quality for products that include notebooks, netbooks, motherboards, graphics cards, displays. The CPU fan headers are non standard. Theres a separate power connector for the memory banks with a proprietary connector. The list goes on Clearly this is a server motherboard adapted only slightly to fit into HPs proprietary case with HPs proprietary power supply and cooling system. Buyers of the Z8. Im not one to give up in the face of a technical challenge and besides Id just forked out a hundred notes on the board so the rest of this article will go through all the steps in detail that you would have to do in order to get one of these beasts up and running yourself. Theres no cheaper way to get 1. Xeon power under your desk. The BIOS and CPU compatibility. The Z8. 00 board comes in three different revisions, indicated by the AS number printed on the white sticker located directly below the big black chipset heatsink. The revisions are indicated by 0. As you can see from the image this board is an 0. The executive summary to what Im about to explain is that if you have revision 0. Xeon X5. 5xx CPUs. If you have the later 0. X5. 5xx or X5. 6xx CPUs. The issue is the BIOS bootblock. Its physically write protected within the BIOS and does not get upgraded when you flash the BIOS. So if you have one of the earlier revisions and you flash your BIOS then the X5. CPUs will be recognised but the bootblock may fail to get that far and you could be presented with a black screen and a POST failure when you power up. The key is the bootblock date shown in the BIOS System Information screen. A date of 1. 11. X5. 6xx CPUs. Note how Ive used the word officially a few times back there because the fact is that it might work. Word on the HP forums is that the behaviour of an earlier revision flashed up to the latest BIOS and used with X5. CPUs ranges from works for me to sometimes wont boot to total failure to POST. The worst issues seem to be with dual CPU configurations. Later on this article Ill go through my own setup and experiences. The case. We need to start with a case for this thing and like I said, even the largest normal tower case will be too small. You need an HPTX format case. There arent many of these and the one I chose was the Nanoxia Deep Silence 6. I got it from Quiet PC in the UK and managed to grab a B grade bargain at 1. I couldnt tell what made it B grade because it looks perfect to me. Maybe I have lower standards than most. I can confirm what the online reviews say when they describe this case as being massive. It is indeed, truly huge. I expect that if it were hollowed out then I could fit my current Fractal Design tower case inside it. It swallows the Z8. Result. Modifying the case to hold the motherboard. I mentioned before that the motherboard mounting holes do not match up with the corresponding holes in the cases motherboard tray. I had to drill and tap new holes for enough screws to hold the board safely with its heavy load of up to two CPUs with large heatsinkfans attached. This is a fiddly process. Before starting I fitted a small random PCI card into the motherboard and used it to work out exactly where the board needed to be so that the cards lined up with their fixing holes on the side of the case. I used a 2. 8mm drill and then tapped the holes out to the correct imperial 63. The hardest part is offering up the motherboard to the tray and accurately marking where to drill. You have to be very accurate or the posts wont line up with the holes and you only get one chance. A slow, controllable drill that wont skid is essential and it needs to get into some confined spaces. Eventually I got all the holes drilled that I thought I could get away with and the board is held securely clear of the base of the case. This is by far the hardest part of the job and even with all my careful measurement and drilling my expansion cards are slightly bent in their slots due to a couple of millimetres of misalignment. Oh well, at least theyre held tight If I were to do this again I would probably drill wider diameter holes in the motherboard tray to allow a small amount of adjustment. Id then use wide washers on either side of the tray, a standoff above the upper washer, a screw through everything and a locking nut at the back of the tray. The power supply. The original Z8. 00 comes with a power supply engineered by HP to fit the genuine HP case. It is, of course, totally incompatible with a standard PC case so I needed a standard PC power supply that met the requirements of the board. The HP power supply distributes the main 1. V output across 8 different rails, each with a maximum delivery of 1. A but with a combined output ceiling of 7. A for the 8. 50. W unit and 9. A for the 1. 11. 0W option. I have no way of knowing how much will actually be drawn by each rail so its safest for me to buy a single rail unit with a nice high overall amperage. I plugged my prospective peripherals into an online PSU amperage calculator and it came out with a recommended 7. W supply for dual 1. W TDP processors, four 1. K SCSI drives, an SSD and an ATI 7. The power supply is so important to the overall stability of the system that I dont skimp on it but, as usual, Im determined to get the best deal I can. After much research I bought a Super. Flower Leadex 1. 00. W 8. 0 gold supply from Overclockers UK on one of their this week only deals for 1. Its very highly thought of and should be more than enough for this system. Custom cabling. I mentioned before that some of the board power connectors are non standard, in fact only the 8 pin EPS connector has a standard pinout and fitting. The main ATX power connector and the memory power connector are custom HP designs. Thankfully the Z8. The main ATX cable. The above image is taken from HPs service manual for the Z8. It shows the pinout of the power cable, taken as you hold the cable and look at the connector. The first issue is the physical cable itself. Each of the pins in the connector is physically keyed with either a square or a slightly rounded socket and there are only 1. Luckily the order and shape of the pins is identical to a standard 2. ATX power cable leaving 6 pins unused at one of the ends. To solve the physical cable issue I bought an ATX power cable extender on ebay for a few pounds and simply sliced off the unwanted pins with a dremel and sanded it to leave a nice finish. The power supplys standard connector will plug into the unmodified end of the extender and the modified end will go into the motherboards socket. The second issue is the pinout. Its not the same as the standard ATX pinout at all. To solve this issue I cut the wires of the extension cable around the center and simply remapped them to match the standard by soldering the ends together. Most of the names in HPs pinout have an obvious mapping to the ATX standard but there are some that need an explanation. The 1. 2V and V1. V ATX line. When mapping the five Z8. V pins to the two ATX PSU pins make sure that you either connect together all Z8. ATX pins or you make sure that the two V1. S pins are not connected to a single ATX 1. V pin. According to table 1 5 in the reference PDF V1.
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