Got a HP Z600 Workstation
In a couple of hours, I will be getting an HP Z600 Workstation (cost 335 CAD (250 USD) with shipping and taxes - Canada is a terrible place for buying hardware :( ). All I'm sure of is that it will come with is:
-Intel Xeon X5670
-12 GB DDR3 ECC RAM (not sure of frequency, registration, or if it's triple channel yet)
-Nvidia Quadro FX 3800
-Windows 10 Pro (ugh)
I will benchmark Windows 10 a bit before upgrading to Windows 2000 and benchmarking that. AHCI, audio and video drivers are available for win2k, not sure about the other components but it should work out fine.
I'm thinking about multi-booting with newer Windows servers and/or XP x64.
Comments
I finally found a DVI cable so I was able to start using it today.
Windows 10 really had the HDD in a chokehold downloading metro apps, sending telemetry and scanning everything with defender for a few minutes. It also claims that my ram is 1600 when BIOS says 1333 (though it may not recognize it as such due to because all official configs had 1333 or less, and it's an earlier BIOS from 2011).
Windows 2000 setup couldn't find my HDD with BWC ICH10R AHCI drivers, so I'm installing in IDE mode. Hopefully BWC's IMSM 7.6 works.
Windows 2000 actually does really well on this machine, in spite of IDE mode and hyper-threading. In crystalmark 2004R7 it actually outperforms Windows 10 x64, Windows Server 2008 x64, Windows XP x64 and matches Windows Server 2003 x86 in CPU operations.
It takes about 3 minutes and 40 seconds to boot though.
My processor is officially clocked at 2.93 GHz, but Windows 2000 forces it to run at 3.19 GHz 95% of the time. Tried setfsb to further increase the frequency but it crashed the OS quickly.
Turns out I have one DDR3-1333 and two DDR3-1600 sticks.
But it's all good. Now I just need to install Windows 7 x64 to run x64-exclusive stuff
Congrats to the Z600, its worth the price!
You seem to have the newer board revision, which is important if you want to run dual X56xx CPUs. But before, apply a firmware upgrade to make it more stable and compatible, I think newest was version 3.61.
It's the last HP workstation with floppy connector.
Mine runs fine on Linux and Mac OS X 10.9 – because Z600's very similar to MacPro 5,1. Also had a Z620, did not work well with Mac OS X, gave it to my boyfriend for his Windows needs.