Nokia X1-01 Full PCB Diagram Mother Board Layout..jpg
Edel Dieringer
About four years ago now the company I work for were investing in some new servers for a project that we were working on and what turned up were quad LGA1366 socket Xeons with support for up to 192Gb of memory. In most cases two sockets were populated with Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs, hex core devices with 12Mb of cache memory. We ran Redhat Enterprise Linux on them and they were, and still are, extremely fast linux servers that could operate as physical boxes in our production environment or virtuals in development.
I wanted one. I still want one. I looked around and noticed that HP were doing a very similar board with two sockets and, crucially, it was packaged up into what looked like a normal PC tower case. And it was very expensive, much too expensive to justify forking out for one.
I can confirm what the online reviews say when they describe this case as being massive. It is indeed, truly huge. I expect that if it were hollowed out then I could fit my current Fractal Design tower case inside it. It swallows the Z800 motherboard as if it were designed for it. Result.
This is a fiddly process. Before starting I fitted a small random PCI card into the motherboard and used it to work out exactly where the board needed to be so that the cards lined up with their fixing holes on the side of the case. I used a 2.8mm drill and then tapped the holes out to the correct imperial 6/32 size for motherboard mounting posts.
The original Z800 comes with a power supply engineered by HP to fit the genuine HP case. It is, of course, totally incompatible with a standard PC case so I needed a standard PC power supply that met the requirements of the board.
When mapping the five Z800 12V pins to the two ATX PSU pins make sure that you either connect together all Z800 pins to both of the two ATX pins or you make sure that the two V12_S pins are not connected to a single ATX 12V pin. According to table 1-5 in the reference PDF V12_S is the line that powers the slots and high power graphics cards can draw up to 75W each from the slots. The second ATX 12V line was added to support these cards and if you were to connect the V12_S lines to a single wire and then add a high-power graphics card then it may not work, or you may start a fire.
The Z800 has a whopping 12 banks of DDR3 memory available and the designers have, in common with many server motherboards where stability is paramount, opted to give it its own power supply. Again the HP service manual comes to the rescue with the pinout of the connector as you look at the cable.
The connector type is the same as the main ATX power cable and again we are very lucky that the keying of the connector shape matches up to one end of the standard 24 pin ATX cable. I purchased another ATX extender cable and sliced off the part of the connector that was not required.
Because this PC is so closely related to a server board it requires registered PC3-10600P 1333MHz DIMMs. A wide range of configuration options is available up to a massive 192Gb when in dual-CPU configuration, explaining the presence of a separate power socket on the board for the memory banks.
Everything seems to be OK. The power button and power LED connections are correct, all the memory is detected, the CPU is detected and the CPU fan is spinning. I went straight into the BIOS settings screen and had a look around. I noticed that the BIOS revision was behind the latest so I upgraded it to the latest version via a USB stick.
The Samsung SSD is a SATA-3 6Gb/s device and although in practice nobody can honestly tell the difference between 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s in real-life usage it would be nice to have the primary SSD on a full-speed bus. The answer is a cheap PCIe card with a couple of SATA-3 connectors on it.
Installing the PERC 4e/DC RAID card caused the BIOS to complain on startup about being out of memory for option ROMs. This is another well documented complaint. The solution was to disable some of the unwanted onboard peripherals, something that also speeded up the POST process.
I got my multimeter out and tested continuity between the BIOS pins and the pins on the footprint and was able to determine the mapping labelled in the image above. Unfortunately WP was not mapped to any of these pins.
I ended up trying a number of different PSUs of various wattages etc before I went back to checking the cable again, and it was indeed wired incorrectly as pointed out above. Just thought this might be helpful to stop some readers pulling their hair out, or worse: giving up on the project!
My modification did not work :(! As an update to everyone who is curious, this post seems to be more hot than my short blurb which is why I am posting it here. I ended up getting a -003 rev motherboard instead.
Hi Ruslan, which motherboard revision do you have? Is it the 001, 002 or 003? If you have an 001 or 002 then it is possible that the BIOS has not been flashed to a revision that supports the X56xx processors. I used an E5506 to flash my 002 BIOS up to the latest version and then it was fine with a single X5680.
he starts, but for the second processor heatsink I did not have because of this he had to pull out
After cooling set but found after the launch automatic installation of the BIOS is not occurred
result:
with a single processor to run two does not work
Bootblock problem again?
Hi, I only know about theTaobao site as a source for pre-made cables. If you visit the forum there is a post from someone who has found pre-made connectors. You still have to solder in the wires though.
Thank-you for this exceptional tutorial on adapting the Z800 to conventional components. I failed the effort a year back and ended up with a couple of basic Z800 systems off lease with regrets for not being capable of realizing your solutions. I still have a spare revision three board that I very first started with, and despite having complete OEM versions now, I am going to follow your guidance and complete my own FrankenZ800 in a Lian-Li case; my first fail was the PSU wiring followed with the CPU cooling solution. Your effort to share is very much appreciated, my thanks from over here in western canada, you have re-inspired me. I have picked up several Z800s recently, minus the CPU/heatsinks/RAM, and I will try to adapt the heatsink and SSD solution to the OEM units too (the last two went for $60 [sixty] CDN with version 003 mobos included which is a few hundred less than last summer so no risk on expenditure end now at all).
If it has been upgraded to the 3.x BIOS then it will additionally boot with the Westmere processors but it is reputed to require lots of tries to boot in dual Westmere configuration (see forum thread). With a single X5680 and BIOS 3.x I found it totally reliable but of course I had to have a Nehalem installed first to get it to boot far enough that I could upgrade the BIOS. Maybe the previous owner has already done this for you?
How do you ignore a POST warning? I have a Z600 and I intended to run it headless, but POST prevented that and the computer beeped and flashed a red led (this happened before the USB was initialized).
Very Interesting Project, But I am wondering why you did not just buy a used Z800, the resellers are selling them so cheap now it does not really make a project like this financially viable.. I just picked up a Z800 on Ebay with 2x 5680 CPUS 96Gb RAM and a 4Gb Quadro5800 for 695. The parts for your hack must have come to more than that?. Although I still think its a great project.
Not sure my first comment made it so here goes again. Sorry if this is a duplicate. Has anyone found a uefi bios for the 591182-001 460838-003 HP Z800 motherboard? I am looking to load Win8, Server 2012 or Win10 in the future and want support for the new security features.
I ended up using two stock intel 980x heatsinks ( -i7-hsf) which I got from ebay for about $16 each. I had to cut a small notch into the mounting legs of both heat sinks as when they were in their proper positions they touched some smt resistors on the motherboard. I also had to cut a notch in the fan cable so the 4 cable connectors coming from the heatsinks would fit on the 5 pin connectors on the motherboard.
Hi Alex , i realise this is a couple years old , however i have a z800 and have ordered a additional x5690 chip , now the heatsink i need is a 463991-001 high perf which cost $300 , i also have a 980x chip and heatsink lying around so can you confirm that i can use the 980x heatsink on the hp z800 motherboard ? and any additional info is appreciated with your install of the 980x heatsink .
I was wondering if you can change the Base Clock at this motherboard??? AKA in a way to Overclock the CPU. I am asking this because I am thinking of building system around this motherboard but I am on tight budget to get x5675 and above, so if I can do that and boost say the x5650 to 2.8-3GHz would be great.
Your memory and your CPU are matched (1066MHz) so no problem there. This is the memory configuration document. Your CPU is officially supported by HP so no problems there either. Boot problems can be due to the BIOS pre-dating the CPU. Have you upgraded the BIOS to the latest version (you can do that in the BIOS itself)? Are you confident that all your memory sticks are OK? Are you using a real Z800 with a real HP PSU? The first place I look for instability issues with anything at all is the power supply.
Are you locked out of the BIOS right now, i.e. you cannot get into the BIOS setup screen? If so then you are going to need to do a factory reset. Disconnect the power supply, take the battery out of the motherboard and wait a few minutes for any caps to discharge then put it back in again.
Thanx for fast replies.
I got new PSU and everything seems to be working fine. I think it was the PSU (500W old); maybe there was not enough power (850W new). Successfully updated the BIOS to 3.7. I can use both slots for video card.
This is mine: 2UA1210JMN. Someone posted it on an internet support forum. It has no actual use to us except to shut that startup warning up. I guess HP support would use it to link back to the actual unit that was shipped to the customer.
b1e95dc632