HP Z820 Help

[richie_C]

So I've bought a used HP Z820 from my workplace to practice some 3D rendering and generally improve my skills as a 3D designer.

Now all seemed well with the machine other than the following:

Boot times - It takes ages to boot, it has a 512GB SATA III Micron SSD, fresh install on Windows 10. It takes ages to load past the inital HP screen where it seems to be checking and detecting the 2 hard drives, it then boots to the windows logo, then goes balck for like 10 seconds (to the point where the monitor turns off as it thinks its lost signal) and then boots into Windows. The whole process can take like 2/3 minutes.

Another issue is - I have my system SSD and a 3TB back up drive, both a detected fine. If I then slot in another 3TB back up drive and boot the PC its gets the the HP screens, shows that the BIOS has found all 3 drives and then just hangs there, it wont boots past that point. If I try to do into the boot setting or BIOS via ESC or F10 nothing happens. I take out the drive, it boots up fine again.

THe last issue is - I get random lag/slowdowns when using the PC. Example I was coping files from one hard drive to the other, I try to load firefox, it lags and takes like a minute to load Firefox.

What I want to know are these easy to fix issue as I very tempted to return it and get a refurnd from my workplace. At the same time I dont want to get rid of it as its a high spec machine:

2 x 8 Core Xeons
56GB DDR 3
1GB nvidia Card (If I can sort out the issues above I'll drop in a 1080ti).

Any idea or help would be greatly appriciated.

 

[Kurgen]

I found the same thing with z840 , had a few spare decomissioned workstations. was going to use one myself, but they take ages to get through HPs BIOS which looks like a mini OS. so i sold them and kept back a CPU to build an x99 system. cant help with the HDDs but i take take the M.2 out of one, and struggled to get it to boot of another drive. the setup of them is so bespoke .

 

[richie_C]

I found the same thing with z840 , had a few spare decomissioned workstations. was going to use one myself, but they take ages to get through HPs BIOS which looks like a mini OS. so i sold them and kept back a CPU to build an x99 system. cant help with the HDDs but i take take the M.2 out of one, and struggled to get it to boot of another drive. the setup of them is so bespoke .

Thank you for the reply.

I think I will ask for a refund. Dont get me wrong the specs are great for the price I paid but taking soooo long to boot up is a nightmare and the fact that when I add an extra HDD it wont boot just isnt worth it.

I was planning on using it for Corona render, the 2 Xeon chips seems to give similar render times to the Ryzen 7 2700X so I amy build a system based round one of them and in the future upgrade to a 16 Core Ryzen 9 once they are relased.