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Hacking an HP Z800 motherboard into a standard PC case

Started by Andy Brown, November 01, 2014, 04:53:46 am

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bulls4ever

Quote from: denj on January 15, 2017, 04:45:47 pm
You're absolutely right!  But when I press the power button, the fans spin up to the highest rpm, it does a system check and just hangs...I don't see the bios load up as usual.  All I know at this point is that it's not receiving enough power to power the gpu. 


weird, Id only have the fans run at max speed when I moved the motherboard to a hacked case and didn't have the main cable attached: It does have a temperature sensor and without it the fans would spin at max speed no matter what. to solve the issue, I grabbed the cable and hacked it into my case.
I got busy and didn't take the pictures, but I will do it soon :)

denj

Quote from: bulls4ever on January 19, 2017, 03:26:30 pm
On a hacked system I run GTX 1080, Titan X Pascal and a Quadro K2200 without any issues. System load isn't that much. I measure the watts and 850W should be fine. My PSU is 1000W but it doesn't even come close to it on usage.

The original PSU has different amps than my "hacked" one . I believe the 850W cant power dual 100W+ CPU
I think the problem is the GPU Power and PSU incompatibility: the connector wont give enough power to the GPU.


Confirmed.  I didn't get a chance but I checked the manual thoroughly regarding the matter: 

http://h50146.www5.hp.com/lib/doc/manual/workstation/hp_workstation/504632_001.pdf

Page 157:


napkin_man

Hi all!  I thought I would share an album of my Z800 build.  Looking forward to checking out the rest of the forum and meeting other Z800 enthusiasts!

http://imgur.com/a/Uj6ts

Specs:
Chieftec Dragon Case
HP Z800 workstation motherboard
Dual Xeon X5677 processors (4 cores, 8 threads, 3.46GHz with 3.73 turbo)
Deep Cool Gammaxx 400 heatsinks
Apevia 80mm case fans
48GB 8500R ECC RAM
Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Reference
Corsair RM1000x PSU
Two Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
Four Seagate 2.5" 500GB HDD

mtothaj

Quote from: napkin_man on January 30, 2017, 03:32:19 pm
Hi all!  I thought I would share an album of my Z800 build.  Looking forward to checking out the rest of the forum and meeting other Z800 enthusiasts!

http://imgur.com/a/Uj6ts

Specs:
Chieftec Dragon Case
HP Z800 workstation motherboard
Dual Xeon X5677 processors (4 cores, 8 threads, 3.46GHz with 3.73 turbo)
Deep Cool Gammaxx 400 heatsinks
Apevia 80mm case fans
48GB 8500R ECC RAM
Nvidia Geforce GTX 980 Reference
Corsair RM1000x PSU
Two Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
Four Seagate 2.5" 500GB HDD


Looking good! Can ou advise where you ordered the custom I/O shield / back plate?

bulls4ever

custom I/O shield is pretty much the only thing left on my project.
If I were you Id dump the 48GB 8500R ECC RAM and get faster ones. It is just too slow and will bottleneck your CPUs

The Low Voltage ones are best as you can fill all the slots and not reduce their speed.

napkin_man

www.ponoko.com is where I ordered the I/O shield from.

I'm on the lookout for faster RAM.  I was on a budget and didn't want to go over.  Plus, I got it all for $50 shipped.

Vtinh0Souza

Hello
I looked at your design with the Z800 motherboard and I loved it.
I am Brazilian and I live in Brazil, here these dual socket cards are very expensive and the ECC memories are also, I wanted to know if it is possible to use non-ECC memories on this motherboard, my idea is to use two Xeon X5660 and 24GB of ram.

Andy Brown

Quote from: Vtinh0Souza on February 14, 2017, 02:34:08 pm
I am Brazilian and I live in Brazil, here these dual socket cards are very expensive and the ECC memories are also, I wanted to know if it is possible to use non-ECC memories on this motherboard, my idea is to use two Xeon X5660 and 24GB of ram.

Hi, do a google search for "HP Z800 Memory Configuration and Optimization" and the first PDF result tells you the types of memory supported, which appears to be ECC and registered. 24Gb of PC10600 ECC is available for about US$50-70 on ebay with international shipping. Is there a problem with customs charges importing into Brazil?
It's worse than that, it's physics Jim!

Vtinh0Souza

It depends, sometimes it passes and they do not charge taxes, sometimes for and they charge pretty much the same value of the product.
Damn taxes
This motherboard is cheap here for selling little, since only those who have a Z800 buy it.
But the memories are absurdly expensive.

Vtinh0Souza

Does this card fit the Thermaltake Core P3 or P5 enclosure?
Could someone pass me the motherboard bores? Maybe I'll design my office.

LambdaFox

You can upgrade to USB 3.1!

I bought a new ZTC ASMedia ASM1142 USB 3.1 pci-e card. I put it in slot 7.  When I booted up, I saw those old familiar memory errors from my H310 install. Covering pins 5 & 6 on the USB 3.1 card made the errors vanish.

I was then able to install the drivers in Windows 7 Pro 64-bit using the included mini CD.

Device Manager shows the driver to be version 1.16.23.0. 

I will post back if I notice any bugs.

Quote from: LambdaFox on December 05, 2016, 11:47:23 am
Update:  The DELL PERC H310 Can Be Hacked Into the Z800!  :)

Quote from: malefic on December 04, 2016, 04:51:49 am
HP P410 works fine, i used it on my build with the 512MB and battery backed cache, also used a HP P400 and the standard LSI controller...all worked with my SAS 15K HDD's....


While waiting for my new P410, I installed Windows on my hard drive RAID using the on-board controller.  That was slow slow slow.  Noticably slower than the H310 had been.  Did I mention it was SLOW???

This made me leary about using the P410 since it drops SATA down to SATA2.  So, I did a little more digging on the H310.

I found this discussion about the H310 preventing machines from booting.  Covering pins B5 and B6 with electrical tape solved my problem.



Some people in several discussions I saw were trying to change the firmware to LSI or other versions.  I am using the standard latest firmware and drivers from Dell.

The errors regarding the bad memory are now gone.  When I installed Windows 7 in spite of the errors, I noticed that the Intel controller did not show up in Device Manager.  I originally thought this was probably because I had all the SATA ports and the option ROM for the controller disabled in the BIOS.  This turns out not to be correct.  With this hack the Intel Controller now shows in Device Manager, where I have Windows disable it after boot.

I will report any glitches I find, but so far it looks good!

Andy Brown

If anyone's in the market for an internal USB 3.0 card that works without any glitches then I can recommend this one from ebay. I use it to hook up the front panel ports on my case.
It's worse than that, it's physics Jim!

msilveira

Hi !

I'm wondering these post messages make pressing F1 a requirement: ???

If yes, has anyone managed to get these ports "sensed".

I've just ordered a Z800 board and I need to get this problem solved, It'll be used as a server!

Helgaiden

Quote from: Attilio Fiandrotti on September 11, 2015, 03:29:24 pm
Quote from: Andy Brown on September 09, 2015, 10:01:36 am
Quote from: Attilio Fiandrotti on September 07, 2015, 01:32:39 am
Here are more pics showing my Z800 MB fitted into a Thermaltake Armor+ VH6000 case with some fancy blue leds. The PSU is a TDPS-825AB from an xw serie desktop. The setup includes the temp sensor, firewire, usb connections to the front panel which silence many POST warnings about missing cables.  Now, only a back panel is missing, plus some fans providing input so to silence the POST warning about missing memory and rear fans. Job almost done :-)


Nice job, especially with the cables. The motherboard itself looks like a tight fit into the case. Did you drill your own holes in the motherboard tray to get it to line up correctly?


Thanks a lot: none of the original mainboard holes matched those on the case. First, I made myself a paper mask where i marked with a pencil the position of the holes in the MB, then I taped the mask to the case and drilled the metal. The result was a more or less good match of the 6 holes.

Now, this evening I fixed also the issue with the bios complaining about the missing memory fan. The original Z800 case had 2 rear fans, and the bios will complain if at least one of the TACH1 and TACH2 signals is absent. As my case has only room for one (big) fan, I modified the fan connector so that the TACH signal is split and reported to both TACH1 and TACH2 on the mainboard. The attached picture is taken from the rear, through an empty expansion slot, and shows the hacked fan connector (did something similar with the DASH connector) to silence another warning). FYI, the rear fan conn pinout is GND, +5V, TACH1, PWM1, TACH2,PWM2 from pin 1 to 6, where pin 1 is that closer to the expansion slots.Notice how pins 3 and 5 are connected together, whereas pins 4 and 6 are left unconnected as my rear fan is not PWM capable.


Quote from: Attilio Fiandrotti on September 13, 2015, 12:17:29 pm
And this is the adaptor I built to connect a standard 4-pin fan to the memory fan socket. it takes +12V, GND, two TACH signals and one PWM (one is left unused) from the mainboard. The two TACH inputs to the mainboard are driven by the same TACH output of the fan. That was enough to silence the BIOS warning about the missing  mem fan. And this was the last warning: now I boot straight into the OS without need to press F1 no more :-)


Hi Attilio. I have this same issue with the F1 errors as everyone else experiences but with a different motherboard. The Z620/Z420 model, to be specific. The 6 pin "fan header" on the rear of the board is for a two fan kit and the weird memory fan connector is a 6 pin type. Here is a picture of the board:



[heres the link in case the picture doesn't work]
http://imgur.com/a/XIWZB

Would this be something you can maybe help me with? I'd happily buy adapters like you made from you, that would be awesome.

Helgaiden

Quote from: msilveira on April 14, 2017, 11:12:07 pm
Hi !

I'm wondering these post messages make pressing F1 a requirement: ???

If yes, has anyone managed to get these ports "sensed".

I've just ordered a Z800 board and I need to get this problem solved, It'll be used as a server!


Have a look at Attilio's posts on page 14