Innovation Catalyst, Productivity Tool for the Digital Age – HP Z4 G4 Workstation Test

As an indispensable force in the field of workstations, HP has been working on its own Z series products for a full 10 years. But we can't say that this decade is the decade when HP's Z series has grown from immaturity to maturity, because the Z series itself is built on the XW series with a longer history and strives for excellence. Therefore, the decade of HP's Z series should be a journey of discovery from one apex to another.

　　Throughout the entire Z series desktop workstation product line, from the Z2 mini that pursues both lightweight and performance to the Z8 that pursues ultimate performance, each product is created for the needs of creative people. The Z4 G4 released by HP this time is the middle force in the entire Z family.

Positioned in the mid-range Z4 G4, from the beginning of its birth, its mission is to pursue a full balance in performance, price, experience, operation and maintenance, etc.; although it does not have the fate of a yellow robe, it is the mainstay full of thinking and ingenuity.

　　The HP Z4 G4 chassis adopts a low-key mid-tower design under the gray and black color scheme. Although the appearance is simple, its origin contains mystery and ingenuity.

The functions on the front of the chassis are relatively simple. The power button sits side by side with the HDD indicator, a 2in1 3.5mm headphone jack, four USB 3.1 ports, and an optional SD card reader port. And below them is a pop-up slimline DVD drive.

The front panel is magnetically attached to the case and can be easily removed for cleaning operations. After removing the front panel, we can find a fan installed on the front of the case responsible for the air intake.

The interface on the back of the chassis is quite rich. The motherboard position includes a power button, two serial ports corresponding to the keyboard and mouse, six USB3.1 ports and two gigabit network card ports. In the graphics card part, there are four full-size DisplayPort 1.4 interfaces, which can simultaneously support 4 sets of 120Hz 4K resolution display output or 4 sets of 60Hz 5K resolution output. Similarly, designers can adjust the extension interface according to their own needs.

　　In addition, the rear of the case also includes a large exhaust fan and a keyhole for locking the side cover of the case.

　　The product serial number and product number of the workstation are placed at the bottom of the chassis, and users can comment on this set of codes to obtain various services on HP's official website and official 400 phone.

On the left side of the chassis, in addition to the big Z logo, there is a handle for opening the side cover. If it is not locked, the equipment operation and maintenance personnel of the enterprise can easily open the side panel of the chassis by lightly pulling the handle.

　As a workstation for professional applications, the internal design of the HP Z4 G4 not only reserves enough space for upgrades, but also achieves the ultimate tool-free maintenance. Graphics cards, hard drives, expansion cards, hard drives, optical drives and other components can be used to tool-less disassembly.

　　It is worth mentioning that the HP Z4 G4 for this evaluation is equipped with a custom-made workstation power supply with a rated power of 465W, and the power conversion efficiency is 90%, so that the long-term rendering work can save more power.

　　HP Z4 G4 adopts an Intel Xeon W-2125 processor for the workstation market, the processor adopts FCLGA2066 interface, Skylake architecture, 4 cores and 8 threads, the third-level cache capacity is 8.25MB, the main frequency is 4.0GHz, and the maximum turbo frequency is 4.5 GHz, 14nm process, TDP120W. In terms of memory, the workstation is equipped with two 16GB DDR4 2666, a total of 32GB, which can basically meet the needs of various 2D and 3D workloads.

　　In the fan part, the workstation uses a bulky HP tower heat pipe radiator and a large silent fan, which can suppress the heat of the CPU at a lower fan speed. At the same time, the front air intake, CPU fan, and rear air exhaust are basically on the same level, which can improve the heat dissipation efficiency of the whole machine while maintaining silence.

　　The motherboard of the HP Z4 G4 adopts the C422 chipset matched with the processor, providing 8 DDR4 DIMM slots, two sets of PCIE x16 slots, one set of PCIE x8 slots, two sets of PCIE x4 slots and two supports NVMe 1.3 protocol M.2 SSD interface.

The default configuration of the workstation is a NVIDIA original QUADRO P4000 professional graphics card. The graphics card adopts a single-slot design, and an additional metal fixing kit is installed at the rear for connection with the chassis. As NVIDIA's professional card for the mainstream workstation market, the QUADRO P4000 core contains 1792 high-performance CUDA cores, equipped with 8GB GDDR5 memory, and TDP105W, which is enough to handle various workloads such as 3ds MAX, MAYA, SOLIDWORKS, and BIM.

　　The specific performance of this graphics card will be tested in detail in the subsequent evaluation session.

　In normal workloads, designers usually load various project files with hundreds of MB or even several GB in productivity software. Therefore, SSDs with higher speed and IO have become the standard equipment for workstations. The HP Z4 G4 is equipped with an M.2 to PCIE x8 transfer card, which provides two M.2 interfaces, and a 512GB SSD equipped with the HP Z4 G4 by default is installed on this transfer card; at the same time, the transfer The interface card also comes with a large-area metal heat sink to enhance the heat dissipation of the SSD; with the two M.2 interfaces that come with the motherboard, this HP Z4 G4 can be equipped with a total of 4 M.2 interface SSDs, which has excellent scalability .

　In terms of 3.5-inch hard drives, the HP Z4 G4 Workstation provides two expansion slots, and users can quickly disassemble and install hard drives through the hard drive bracket. The hard disk bracket is meticulously crafted, which not only provides excellent shock absorption, but also ensures the stability of the hard disk installation.

　The ultra-thin optical drive at the front of the chassis is also connected to the chassis through this 5.25-inch expansion slot bracket. The HP Z4 G4 offers two such expansion slots, both of which support tool-free maintenance.

　　Performance Testing

　　As usual, first a CPU-Z screenshot of this Intel Xeon W-2125 processor.

　　Next is AIDA64's basic performance test of main memory and GPU.

In CineBench R15, HP Z4 G4's CPU multi-threading score is 824cb, GPU rendering score is 172.94, the mainstream performance level in workstations, which can meet the needs of most design work.

　In terms of SSD read and write speed, the HP Z4 G4 did not disappoint us. Even if it is installed on an adapter card, this 512GB SSD still achieves sequential read and write speeds of 3465MB/s and 1896.4MB/s, which is at the advanced level among M.2 interface SSDs.

　Of course, in addition to read and write speeds, IOPS is also an important indicator to measure storage performance. In IOMeter, we use 8worker to simulate heavy load. In the 64KB sequential read and write test, the IOPS of the SSD mounted on the HP Z4 G4 reached 12749 IOPS for reading and 8137 IOPS for writing; while the sequential reading and writing of 512b small files In the test, its performance was 18607 IOPS for reading and 17430 IOPS for writing, showing excellent small file reading and writing performance, which is also the top level among current NVMe 1.3 protocol M.2 interface SSDs.

3ds Max is one of the most common 3D modeling and rendering tool software today. Here we use 3ds Max 2015 and the generic SPECapc script to test the HP Z4 G4 workstation.

　　Under the setting of 1920*1080 resolution and anti-aliasing not turned on, we conducted three complete tests and took the average of the three results. Finally, in the SPECape 3ds Max 2015 test, the HP Z4 G4 workstation scored 5.07 for CPU, 4.60 for GPU, and 5.07 for large model editing and rendering. This performance is also sufficient to meet the needs of most 3D modeling scenarios. Even if it is a fine model with hundreds of thousands of polygons, the HP Z4 G4 workstation can still complete various basic operations at a high frame rate when running.

In SPECviewperf7.1, which is more theoretically tested, the HP Z4 G4 workstation can run at a full frame rate of 60fps in most scenes.

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