The Z600: a great machine - just add memory.
I already had one of these, bought recently and set up with Windows 10 Pro, and decided that it would be a good idea to have a pair of them to make use of the knowledge I gained from the other one They date from around 2010, but they were high quality machines at the time and are mostly ex-corporate and in good condition. This one was as clean as a whistle. It benchmarked at around 18,000 on Geekbench, as against 5000 or so for your average i5 or equivalent ultrabook. I expected this because (a) hyperthreading wasn't enabled, and (b) the processors have 3 channel access to memory so for best performance you need to populate all 3 slots for each processor. With only 4GB overall (1 slot populated with 2GB for each processor) it naturally performed poorly in the memory benchmarking part of geekbench. It came with a proper Windows 7 Pro sticker, but without an OS installed. I figured to download a bootable image, install Win 7 pro, activate it with the code, and take advantage of the free upgrade to W10 before the door closed on July 29. Unfortunately Microsoft wouldn't let me download the W7 image, saying that my key seemed to be from a version installed by the original manufacturer, so contact them! Instead, I booted it up from a CD-ROM W10 Pro install CD I had made, and when it asked for an activation code I gave it the W7 pro number. No harm trying, and in fact it worked. W10 Pro is activated with a digital certificate, as If I had upgraded the W7 pro licence in the usual way. The next trick was to enable hyperthreading. With the previous one it just came up as soon as I enabled in in the BIOS. This one didn't. However, after playing some games switching off cores and switching them back on (see the BIOS documentation at HP, which is brilliant) it suddenly got the message for 2 cores and 2 threads, and I could set it to all cored and it showed 2 processors x 6 cores x 2 threads each - 24 logical processors producing a Geekbench score just over 20,000 as against 23,000 or so for one with properly balanced memory. The last step was to flash the BIOS up from 3.54 to 3.60 - always a bit scary with an older machine is case it goes bloop, but all was well. I have now filled it with my favourite software and have ordered 48GB of memory for it. One of the two x 1TB disks gets a warning flag on HWinFO64, but they show as having been up and running for nearly 2 years each and you have to expect SOME wear and tear. The beauty of it is that these are well made machines from a major company and had a long production run - even now the Z620's continue it, and they're easy to work on. Basically, if you want a lot of crunching for your money and can find a friendly neighbourhood geek to help out, these boxes are excellent value. But be sure you do some R&D on the range of processors (of which there are many) and Geekbench performances.
Postscript October 2020: This machine is still running just fine with W10 (2004 version), and another Z600 has been running continuously for the last 6 months with its GTX 1060 GPU at nearly 100 capacity 24/7 folding proteins to fight COVID via Foldingathome.Read full review
Verified purchase: No
