It has been some months that I’ve been waiting for the release for the new workstation Z series from HP. Promised some time around november 2011 they came officially only in april 2012. Now that some configurations and prices have been set I ordered a model z620 last week…together with a ZOTAC GEFORCE GTX670 graphics card.

Workstation configuration is a base Z620 model with an XEON E5-1620 3.6 4 Core CPU, 1 TB SATA 6 GB/s hard disk, 16GB RAM PCI 1600 and so on…

Instead of a standard professional CAD graphics card I choose a ZOTAC GEFORCE GTX670 graphics card for gaming from ZOTAC. I also ordered a 2nd. 1 TB SATA 6 GB/s hard disk so as to separate the OS and application data from my user data…

Here you can see how it looks to unpack the workstation…

opening the box…

power cabling, recovery media, mouse and keyboard…

..after removing part of the packaging the top of the workstation can bee seen… the grabbing handle is on the top right… to lift the 38lbs out of the box…

…19kg or about 38lbs. to lift out of the box… this is the front of the Z620 with the power button, USB 2 and 3, firewire, mic and speaker connectors on the right side…

… on the near top there is a 22 slot media card reader and the DVD…

…the whole set unpacked… HP Z620, keyboard, mouse, recovery media kit….

..plus the ZOTAC GEFORCE GTX670 graphic card and the additional 1TB SATA 6/GBs hard disk…

Now that we have everything together we can start to build the hardware assembly as planned…

The HP Z620 with its massive aluminium cover removed… notice that almost all user serviceable parts do not need any tools… they are marked green or made of green material…

Putting in the extra 1 TB SATA hard disk is a breeze because there is no cabling at all and no tools are necessary either. Simply take out the plastic holder, attach the hard disk to it and move it back into the slot…

Now the ZOTAC GEFORCE GTX670 takes a bit more because it has two 6 pin power slots which need to be feed with electricity…

The package and contents of the ZOTAC pack…

..opening up the PCI slot covers here with first pulling the green handles down…

…insert the ZOTAC GEFORCE GTX670 graphics card into PCI E 3 slot number 2… both the HP Z620 and the ZOTAC GTX670 are PCI E 3 compatible which gives us a much higher data through put than PCI E 2 does…

…notice the 2 6 pin power cables stacked into the empty slots just where the cooling fan is..? They can be used to power the graphics card or any other PCI-E card… theoretically that is, because one is to short to reach the graphics card and the other just reaches it. No problem at all i guess, it means I need to get an extension… but a few inches of cabling longer than this would not be such a big issue at the manufacturing side and would save me the hassle of getting a separate extension cable.

Now, here are just a couple more pictures from different angels…

The HP Z620 is capable of delivering about 300 Watts of power to the PCI-E interfaces. More than enough for the ZOTAC GTX670 which needs about 150 Watts…

On the Windows 7 experience index the HP Z620 has a 7.7 rating for the CPU, 7.9 rating for Memory, Graphics and Gaming Graphics but only a 6 for the primary hard disk… I do not have any other performance measurements at hand but I think to give me a little bit of an indication of the workstations performance it is enough…

Just seen in my latest Windows 8 installation that Microsoft as changed the highest possible score to a 9.9 which makes comparing the 2 operating systems a bit more difficult.

Enjoy, if you are thinking about the same or similar hardware configuration… it needed a bit of asking questions to both the HP support in Switzerland and ZOTAC support in Germany but they have both been helpful enough… with almost instant answers…

but alas, the final decision and hence the responsibility was still with me, the customer

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