A few months ago we had the opportunity of reviewing the HP Z800 and it got our praise in just about every way. Today we are looking at its little brother the Z600.

Features

• Engineered to perform
  The HP Z600 is engineered to optimize the way processor, memory, graphics, OS, and software technology work together to deliver massive, whole-system computational power.
• Sleek new industrial design
  Brushed aluminum side panels, integrated handles, and visually cable-less engineering are just a few of the new design features that create new standards for lowered acoustics, serviceability, and energy efficiency.
• Designed with the environment in mind
  Lower power and cooling costs with ENERGY STAR® qualified configurations, 85% efficient power supplies, and HP WattSaver, an energy-saving feature that, when activated, helps lower energy consumption in off mode.
• Revolutionary architecture
  Tackle bigger problems faster and process more tasks and threads in parallel with the new Intel® QuickPath Technology and new Intel® Xeon® processors* with integrated memory controllers.
• Compact and unassuming
  Enhance your work area with HP’s quietest workstation, designed for environments where space is at a premium.
• Ease of service without comparison
  The tool-free chassis and the uncluttered and highly streamlined internal design gives you the ability to add or change components in mere seconds.
• Easy-to-use system diagnostics tool
  Quickly capture complete system configuration data and share with IT personnel with HP Vision Field Diagnostics, an easy-to-use system diagnostics tool that runs outside the OS.

Product: HP Z600 WorkStation Condition: Refurbished Form Factor: Tower Model Processor: 2 x Intel Xeon Quad or Hexa Core E5500, X5500 & X5600 Chipset: Intel 5520 Memory: 6 DIMM Slots RAM: Support Upto 96GB Memory Hard Drive: Three 3.5-inch SATA, Three 5.25 inch Slots: 2 PCI Express x16 Gen2 Graphics Slots 1 Year Warranty on RAM & Processor 3 Months Warranty on Remaining Parts. Page 52 Slot 6 option ROM download (Enable or Disable), and latency timer and speed 32/33 Slot 7 - PCIe2 Slot 7 option ROM download (Enable or Disable), and latency timer and speed x16(8) HP Z600 PCI slots Chapter 4 System management ENWW.

HP 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3-1333 ECC Registered RAM Z600, Z800 FX621AA HP 8GB (1x8GB) DDR3-1333 ECC Registered RAM Z600, Z800 FX622AA PC3-8500 (DDR3-1066) ECC Registered DIMMs € € HP 16GB (1x16GB) DDR3-1066 ECC Registered RAM Z800 NL674AA Introduction Boost the capabilities of your HP Workstation and keep it performing reliably with HP DDR3 memory. To the right of the PCI card slots are 2 hot swappable Hard Drive bays. With my Z600 workstation HP filled the drive bays with 2 150GB 15000 RPM SAS drives. They also put in a single 1 TB 7200 RPM data drive in one of the lower slots. The bays slide out fairly easily, but getting them back in can be a challenge.

Packed with either one or two Quad Core Xeon processors and clock speeds between 2.00 GHz and 2.93 GHz the Z600 workstation is all setup to provide exceptional performance.

One of the things that impressed me the most about the Z600 was the design. To come up with the design HP employed the services of BMW DesignWorks.

The Z600 workstation is very expandable, if you are willing to pay for it. The system supports up to 24GB of RAM, but it does not come cheap. To add the full 24GB of DDR3 RAM it is going to add $2920 to the cost of the system.

The Z600 workstation is also built to be green. No, I am not talking about the color, I am talking about how energy efficient it is. I know that a workstation with 2 Quad core CPU’s and 24GB of RAM is not going to be a low power machine, but the Z600 does have an 85% energy efficient power supply.

One of my favorite things about the Z600 workstation is how easy it is to take apart. There are lots of easily removable parts, but the one I liked the most is the power supply. This power supply only has one cable, so it is easy to pull out and replace if needed. I will talk more about the power supply below.

Design

The whole case, inside and out, was designed by BMW DesignWorks. BMW spent quite a bit of effort making the case very easy to get into, easy to take apart, and quite and cool. There are no tools required to open the Z600 case, or to access each of the parts. When you look inside the case you will notice lots of green touch points. Each of these touch points indicate a part that can be moved or removed.

The front of the Z600 case has a simple design without a lot of frills. In the middle is a single slot loading DVD, with an eject button just below the slot. On the right side of the case is the power button, 3 USB ports, a headphone and microphone jack, and a Firewire port.

The back of the Z600 case is fairly standard, it has 2 80mm fans on the right and on the left are a bunch of I/O ports. The I/O ports consist of 2 PS/2 ports, 6 USB ports, a Network port, a microphone, audio in, and audio out jack. Below all that are the PCI card slots, in the machine I have there is a single video card with 2 Display ports and a DVI plug.

Now we get to the interesting part, the left side of the case. The left side of the Z600 case is mostly bare except for a small handle and a lock. When you lift the handle the side comes off very easily and we get our first view of the inside.

The first thing to notice, when compared to the Z800, is that the power supply is at the bottom instead of the top. However, just like the Z800, the power supply is what I like the best. The power supply in the Z600 is very unique and it has several innovative design features. As you can see from the picture the power supply spans the entire length of the case. This was done so that the power supply can get its own fresh air from the front of the case and expel it out of the back. Unfortunately, the second thing that I liked about the Z800 power supply is not the same with the Z600, the Z800 power supply was completely cable-less. The Z600 however, has a single cable that comes out of it for the graphics card. Only having one cable still allows the power supply to be easily removed and replaced without having to unplug all the cables of a standard power supply. Instead of the cables being attached to the power supply they are attached to the case. There are two plugs in the case that the cables are attached to and there are two plugs on the power supply that connect to the plugs in the case. The reason I like this feature so much is because I recently had to replace the power supply in my personal computer, so I know how much of a pain it is to remove all the cables.

Up at the top is a removable panel that covers the memory slots. When the panel is removed the first thing you see is a fan. The fan helps to keep the memory cool. Below the Memory are the CPUs. Each CPU has a fan and HeatSink so that the CPU’s will stay cool, they are also slightly offset so that the heat from the front one does not go into the back one.

Below the CPUs are the PCI slots. The Z600 only supports one video card. If you will remember the power supply only had the one video power cable also. One upgrade I would probably recommend is a sound card. As you may have noticed, the motherboard does not have enough audio ports to support anything more than a 2.0 speaker system. If you are doing audio or video editing you are going to want more and so a sound card will be required.

To the right of the PCI card slots are 2 hot swappable Hard Drive bays. With my Z600 workstation HP filled the drive bays with 2 150GB 15000 RPM SAS drives. They also put in a single 1 TB 7200 RPM data drive in one of the lower slots. The bays slide out fairly easily, but getting them back in can be a challenge. There is a lever on each drawer that needs to be lowered for removal and raised to lock it into place. If you happen to not get the drive pushed in all the way before locking the lever the hard drive will not be fully connected.

Below the hard drives are the 5.25″ drive bays. These bays a quite a bit harder to get to when compared to the hard drives, but the tool-less design helps to keep things as easy as possible.

Overall the design is great, as I said before it is very easy to get into and access all the various parts.

Performance

With a workstation like this, one would expect that the performance would be really good. So I was very interested in finding out just what the Z600 could do.

Resuming from sleep is very slow. The login screen shows up very quickly, but it takes about 20 seconds before the USB mouse and keyboard start responding to movement and key presses.

I kept my performance testing very simple with the Z600. Most performance tests do not do an adequate job of representing the true power of 8 hyper-threaded cores, so I turned off hyper-threading. In addition PCMark05 and 3DMark06 are getting old and it is time we stopped using those numbers, so I only used PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage. SpecViewPerf is also difficult to use and get reliable numbers from because its programs are all single threaded. To over come this SpecViewPerf runs multiple instances of each program, but so far the max it can do is 4, so half of my cores will go unused.

So on to the actual testing. The first test I did was 3DMark Vantage. This test puts all the components through different tests. As I described above all tests are done with hyper-threading turned off. The scores are decent, as you can see. During the tests the machine stayed very quiet.

The next test I ran was PCMark Vantage. This test does not stress the components as much as 3DMark.

My third test is with Bapco’s SYSMark. This test is similar to PCMark in that it does not really stress the system. Instead it uses programs like Office and Photoshop to test and see how well the Z600 will respond to real world situations. Since this workstation is more likely to run those programs instead of games, this test is more realistic for buyers of this workstation.

So that does it for the performance tests. Next I wanted to see how much heat I could generate and how much power it would take up. For this I turned on Hyper-threading (uses up more power and generates more heat), downloaded Prim95, and started it up. During this I had SpeedFan running and Kill A Watt plugged in. Before I started Prime95 I recorded the power at 154 Watts, and the Heat at about 18 C.

After running Prime95 for a while I recorded the power again, this time at 421 Watts and the Heat at 79 C. It just goes to show that this Workstation is capable of running hot, and using quite a bit of power.

I noticed that during all these tests, even the CPU tests, the fans did not get any louder. This may explain why the CPU temps got so high, but they never got too high to cause concern.

I was surprised to see that some of the tests came out with the Z600 outperforming the Z800. This could possibly be because of updated software or drivers. I wish I still had the Z800 so I could rerun those tests.

For my last test I wanted to see how the 15000 RPM SAS drive compared to my personal machines 2x 7200 RPM Raid-0 setup. So I downloaded a little app that tests hard drives. I first ran it on my desktop with the Raid-0. As you can see the numbers look fairly good. Next I ran it on the HP Z600 with the 15000 RPM SAS drive. When I saw the numbers I was blown away. I only wish I could setup a Raid-0 with the SAS drives. Unfortunately, the Z600 configuration I have does not support Raid-0.

Support and Warranty

The warranty that comes with the Z600 is a 3 years parts, and labor with onsite service standard warranty. There is an option to add onto that with additional coverage. The maximum warranty that I could find was for 24×7 4-hour on-site response – 5 yrs, workstation + monitor. The is a great warranty and it only costs $519. Considering that this is the same extended warranty as the Z800 and the fact that the Z600 is not nearly as expensive and cannot have as much hardware I was expecting it to be a bit cheaper.

Support can be found with a quick visit to the HP website for drivers and other downloads. HP also has forums where you can ask questions that can be answered by HP staff or other customers. If you would rather talk to someone in person a call to their support reps can give you the answers you are looking for. Last but not least, you could send HP an E-mail.

Conclusion

After all is said and done the Z600 certainly lives up to the expectations that were set by the Z800. If you are looking for a Workstation and the Z800 is out of your price range then the Z600 may fit the bill. Its performance is very similar in most tests and it costs a lot less. You do lose a bit of expandability, but do you really needs 192GB of RAM? If this sounds like you then give the Z600 a try.

The HP Z600 V2 Workstation has all the base components to be converted in to a solid gaming computer. HP Z600’s are a dual socket Xeon based workstations. The Z600 V2 supports up to 96GB of DDR3 memory and 2 Internal SAS/SATA Hard Drives. It is important to note that it has an standard 600W Power Supply, which limits the Graphics Cards that you can install. Let us show you how you can build an effective HP Z600 V2 Gaming PC.

How do I check to see if my HP Z600 is a V1 or V2?

Open your side panel and check your system board PN.

Version 1 has system board PN: 461439-001 (460840-002)

Version 2 has system board PN: 591184-001 (460864-003)

Where to buy?

If you haven’t already acquired a HP Z600 Workstation we’d recommend checking out a company called Serverworlds. They sell the Z600’s cheap and they provide free ground shipping to the lower 48 states. You can also try to snag them cheap on Ebay. However, Ebay can be a bit of a gamble because you never know what you are going to get.

The goal is to purchase the Z600 with a good processor(s) and memory already installed and then you can source the graphics cards, hard drives, and other optional components from other sources.

What Processor(s) should I get?

High Clock speed cpu’s are the way to go.

In most cases you can get by with a single processor listed below. If you plan to stream your gaming on youtube or twitch, we recommend getting 2 processors.

Recommended Processors:

Up to 2 x 6C Xeon X5660 2.8Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors 3.20Ghz Max Turbo Frequency (SLBV6)

Up to 2 x 6C Xeon X5675 3.06Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors 3.46Ghz Max Turbo Frequency (SLBYL)

How much Memory should I get?

The base line should be a minimum of 16GB of memory. However, 16GB to 32GB would be ideal.

Memory PNs:

4GB PC10600R 2Rx4 ECC Reg Shielded (NN876)

4GB PC10600R 2Rx8 ECC Reg (7H8J8)

4GB PC10600R 2Rx8 PC3L ECC Reg(9J5WF or H5DDH)

8GB PC10600R 2Rx4 PC3L ECC Reg (P9RN2)

8GB PC10600R 2Rx4 ECC Reg Shielded (X3R5M)

16GB PC10600R 2Rx4 PC3L ECC Reg (MGY5T)

*12800R modules will work as well, they will just clock down to 1333Mhz depending on the CPU speed*

Recommended Memory configurations:

4 x 4GB PC10600R Modules (16GB)

6 x 4GB PC10600R Modules (24GB)

4 x 8GB PC10600R Modules (32GB)

6 x 8GB PC10600R Modules (48GB)

4 x 16GB PC10600R Modules (64GB)

6 x 16GB PC10600R Modules (96GB)

It’s very important to use 10600R modules because they will run at the max speed supported by the system board and processor.

What Hard Drive should I get?

Ideally you would want to have a Solid State Drive as your boot device as well an NVME.2 SSD to store your game libraries/large programs on. If you are limited on budget you could go with a small SSD for your boot device and a larger capacity 7.2K SATA drive to hold your larger files/programs/games.

Recommended SSD Drives:

Samsung 860 EVO 2TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E2T0B/AM)

Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM)

Samsung 860 Evo 500GB 2.5 inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)

Recommended large Capacity SATA Drives:

Seagate 2TB BarraCuda SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch Desktop Hard Drive (ST2000DM006)

*NVME.2 Drives cannot be used as a boot device with this model workstation*

NVME.2 PCIe Adapter (You need this if you plan to install an NVME.2 Drive in to this system):

NVME.2 SSD Adapter *Required to Install NVME.2*

Recommended NVME.2 SSDs:

Samsung 960 EVO Series – 500GB NVMe – M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E500BW)

Samsung 970 Evo Series – 500GB NVMe -M2 Internal SSD (MZ-V7E500BW)

Samsung 960 EVO Series – 1TB PCIe NVMe – M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E1T0BW)

Samsung 970 EVO Series – 1TB PCIe NVMe – M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V7E1T0BW)

What Graphics Card should I get?

The HP Z600 has a 600W Power Supply. This will limit your Graphics Card options.

Recommended Graphics Cards:

NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB Graphics Card

NVIDIA GTX1660 Ti 6GB Graphics Card (takes up 3 PCI slots)

NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB Graphics Card

NVIDIA GTX 1070 TI 8GB Graphics Card

NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB Graphics Card

NVIDIA RTX 2070 8GB Graphics Card

What type of Monitor should I get?

Ideally it would be nice to get a monitor with a 144Hz or 244hz refresh rate or better monitor. However, it really depends on the games you play. If you play first person shooter games a 144hz or 240Hz or better monitor is a must. If you play other games that do not require quick response time then a 60hz monitor should work fine.

Recommended Monitors:

ASUS PG248Q Full HD 144Hz 1MS 24″ Gaming Monitor

ASUS VG278Q Full HD 1080P 144Hz 1MS 27″ Gaming Monitor

ASUS XG258Q ROG Strix 24.5″ 1080P 240Hz 1MS Gaming Monitor

Recap:

Using the criteria above you can build a good to borderline high end gaming system using a HP Z600 Workstation.

Sample Configuration:

HP Z600 Workstation

1 x 6C Xeon X5675 3.06Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs

32GB PC10600R (4 x 8GB)

Samsung 1TB 6GBPS SSD

GTX1660 Ti w/6GB Graphics Card

1 x 10/100/1000 Network Port

600W Power Supply

DVD-RW

10 Pro 64Bit

We have tested this system with games like Dota 2, CS Go, PubG, and The Division. The frames can range from 60FPS to 160FPS depending on the game and settings that you choose. The system was tested using a 144Hz 27″ Acer Monitor.

Accessories:

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SteelSeries QCK Heavy Cloth Gaming Mouse Pad (Click Here)

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SteelSeries Apex M750 RGB Mechnical Keyboard (Click Here)

Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum RGB Tunable Gaming Mouse (Click Here)

HyperX Cloud II 7.1 Gaming Headset (Click Here)

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El Gato Game Capture HD60 Pro for a Streaming Capture PC (Click Here)

Secretlab Premium Gaming Chairs (Click Here)

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Please contact us if you have any questions!

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