HP Z Workstations Are Upgradable Beasts for Pros

Back in the day if you really wanted a powerful rig, you rolled your own. Most of us still do this today for our personal machines but most businesses don’t want to do that. They want machines with a warranty and support to fix issues if needed so they buy from a big name manufacturer. HP has some new workstations that have all the power inside and are very upgradable when needed called the Z Workstation.

There are several rigs in the series including the Z8, Z6, and Z4 desktops. The top-of-the-line rig is the Z8 and it packs inside the chassis 24 RAM slots supporting up to 3TB of RAM, dual Xeon CPUs with up to 56 cores, dual M.2 SSD slots, and dual NVIDIA Quadro Pro graphics. With all that power inside, it’s aimed right at the video FX folks out there who run 3D simulations, edit 8k video, and other very demanding tasks on their workstation.

There is a lot of connectivity as well with nine total full height PCIe slots, ten UB 3.1 ports, and lots more inside a tool-free chassis. A basic Z8 is $2,439 and you might think that’s not too bad, until you realize that is lacking most hardware you will need inside. A Z8 with a pair of Xeon Platinum 8180 CPUs and a pair of P6000 Quadro graphics cards will run you an extra $35,000 says Engadget.

The Z6 has similar features, but a max of 384GB of RAM and still has a dual Xeon CPU option. The Z4 is the bottom end machine supporting up to 256GB of RAM and a single Xeon CPU. The Z8 and Z6 workstations will land in October with the Z4 coming in November.