Fellow HPians,
In March, when preparing z620_2 (Xeon E5-1680 v2 8C@4.3GHz/ z420 liquid cooling / 64GB / Quadro P2000 / HP Z Turbo Drive 256GB + Intel 730) to add music production to it's 3D CAD and graphic design duties, I updated the BIOS from v.3.91 to v.3.92, which was only a few weeks old at the time. This was done using the .EXE in Windows as I've done many times before on the five HP z-series I've had.
During the upgrade, the progress bar showed the 3.91 BIOS saved and 3.92 flashed successfully. However, quite soon the screen went black and after a pause, the fans began spinning up and I shut the system down on the power switch.
Looking in the user manual, there was a crisis recovery jumper mentioned for the z820, but not for the z420 or z620. Assuming the motherboard had been ruined, I bought a replacement and - stupidly in retrospect-installed 3.92.
The system ran, except that the Quadro P2000 that had tested in Passmark Performance Test as high as 9030 in 3D, was now testing as low as 7646 and the 2D that had been 874 was reduced to 549.
As the Z Turbo Drive Windows installation was high mileage and the configuration of a new UEFI Windows 7 installation was proving elusive without buying a new copy of Windows, a Samsung 860 Evo 500GB was installed with Windows 7 from the orignal HP recovery disks, plus all the software reloaded.
The results from the P2000 were improved a bit- 8038, 8126, and etc., but the the 2D remained very poor.
The P2000 was exchanged at PNY for a new one who were very good about it, but the results were only very slightly better. TO run while the P2000 was away, I decided to give GTX a try and bought an MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X- which is on the edge of not fitting in the case- and while this had quite good in 3D- 11350, the 2D was also terrible for that GPU on a system tunning at 4.3GHz - 579.
Meanwhile, having learned that the z620 has a crisis recovery jumper, I was successful on the first try using the .bin file on a FAT32 USB but- most stupidly of all, recovered the orignal motherboard to 3.92.
Susprise! the performance was the same. At the same time, hearing rumors about performance issues with 3.92, I decided to reflash z620_2 to 3.91. However, five attempts, from Windows in Safe Mode and from USB, in the first 3 tries had an "unrecoverable error" that was "unknown" and in Safe Mode the flash was shown as sucessful, yet restarting revealed that the BIOS remained v. 3.92. Of course, the graphic results were the same. The subsequent two attempts to revert to 3.91 produced the same result.
I decided to try the P2000 in one of the 3.91 (z420_1 and z420_3) systems and upgraded z420_3 from a Xeon E5-1607 V2 (4C@3.0) to E5-1620 V2 (4V@3.7/3.9) / 16GB /changed the GTX 660Ti to the Quadro P2000 / Samsung 860 Evo 500GB + Intel and the results were revealing:
Remember that the 860 Evo was straight from z620_2. The 8419 3D and , especially 755 2D were more like it, considering that is comparing the results on 3.9GHz to 4.3GHz.
Subsequently, I checked Passmark results for the P2000 and was surprised to see that the 2D results vary so considerably. The top 2D mark is 1354 on i7-7700K @ 5GHz, but the shock is the bottom mark of 133 on a Dell Precision T5820 / Xeon W-2133 3.6/3.8 - a currently available system, a Threadripper 1950X @ 4.1GHz = 267, and HP z440 E5-1630 v4 @ 3.7/4.0GHz: 682- not terrible, but not up to z420_3's E5-1620 v2 of 2013. A very interesting result was an i7-7820X 8C@3.6/4.5GHz/ 64GB/ Samsung 960 Pro M.2 and the P2000 results are 2D=634 and 3D=7944. That is also not as good as z420_3 with an E5-1620 v2. Of course, the HP 3.92 BIOS can not be at fault in the non HP systems, but:
Q1: What is going on?
As the two z620 motherboards using 3.92 have the same results, whereas the 3.91 results were proportionally similar to the original z620_2 @ 4.3GHz with 3.91, I'm convinced that 3.92 is at fault. This may have some relationship to Spectre/Meltdown considerations.
A straight question for HP:
Q2: Can BIOS V. 3.92 be reverted to V. 3.91 or NOT?
BambiBoomZ