HP Z2 Mini workstation HP’s impressive micro machine is great for bread and butter 3D CAD but, with rigid specs, buyers need to be confident that workflows won’t change Small Form Factor (SFF) workstations like the HP Z240 SFF are becoming much more prevalent in design and engineering offices. What were once considered entrylevel workstations, with compact chassis of around 100 x 350 x 400mm, are now powerful enough to satisfy the requirements of most 2D and 3D CAD users. HP has now gone one step further with an even smaller workstation called the Z2 Mini. Similar in stature to the Apple Mac Mini, HP’s beautifully styled machine is small enough to be held in one hand. A mere 58 x 216 x 216mm in size, it can happily sit on a desk, but can also be mounted on the back of a display or under a desk. There are many advantages to this new mini form factor. First, and most obvious, is it takes up less desk space, which can be a big benefit in a world of rising property prices. HP reckons there has been a 60% space reduction per person in the US over last 10 years. One could argue that you simply get around this by putting your workstation tower under your desk. However, when kept down by your feet they become serious dust magnets and need to be cleaned regularly to keep fan noise in check (clogged fans need to work harder to achieve the same cooling). Floor standing machines can also create a micro climate under your desk. This can be great in winter to warm frosty toes, but not so much in summer. Even when your office is air conditioned, the environment can become unbalanced. We have heard anecdotes of people wearing jumpers on top and shorts down below. The second benefit is portability. The HP Z2 Mini is so small and light (it starts at 2.04kg) that you can easily pop it in your bag to take home or to a meeting. And with an optional built-in Intel 8265 WLAN 802.11ac module you can connect to WiFi wherever you go. The third is, admittedly, subjective, but we think it looks rather cool. HP has obviously paid a lot of attention to the styling of its mini workstation, but the corner 34
detail is actually derived from Intel Core i3 / i5 / i7 — but a Product spec functional requirements. The custom entry-level ‘mobile’ custom cooling system, which GPU, the Nvidia Quadro M620 ■ Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 (3.5GHz, 3.9GHz features dedicated fans for (2GB). The machine can support Turbo) (4 Cores) CPU both GPU and CPU, draws in up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM ■ 16GB (2 x 8GB) air from the front two corners across two SODIMMs, which DDR4-2133 non-ECC SDRAM memory and out at the rear two corshould be plenty for most CAD ■ 512GB HP Z Turbo ners. As the vents shouldn’t workflows. Drive G2 (NVMe SSD) become obstructed for obviDespite the thermal challeng■ Nvidia Quadro M620 GPU (2GB) ous reasons, they are protectes of producing such a small ■ Microsoft Windows ed by the chamfered edges of machine, the Z2 Mini offers 10 Pro 64-Bit the main chassis. A lot of scipretty much the same level of ■ 216mm x 216mm x ence went into this. HP’s CPU performance as one can 58 mm (w) x (d) x (h) workstation team told AEC find in a SFF workstation. Our ■ 3-year (3-3-3) limited warranty and Magazine that, in designing test machine’s top-end Intel service offering the HP Z2 Mini, it did more Xeon E3-1245 v6 (3.7GHz up to includes 3 years of parts, labour and simulation and analysis cool4.1GHz) is only a shade slower on-site repair ing work than on any other than the Intel Xeon E3-1270 v6 ■ £1,219 + VAT product. Computational Fluid (3.8GHz up to 4.2GHz), the hp.com/go/z2mini Dynamics (CFD) was even fastest model available in the used to optimise the individuHP Z240 SFF. al spacing of the cooling fins. In use, such subtleties will likely go This attention to detail results in a unnoticed. Indeed, in our multi-threaded remarkably quiet design, which is impres- KeyShot rendering benchmark, the HP Z2 sive for a machine of this size. When idle, Mini was only 9% slower than the Armari the workstation is virtually silent and Magnetar V25 we tested back in February noise levels are still perfectly acceptable 2017 (tinyurl.com/magnetar-AEC), which when the CPU is being pushed to its limits. had an overclocked 4.7GHz Intel Core i7 One minor criticism would be that fan 7700K CPU. speeds are not always consistent. When While the CPU is on par with most rendering a scene in KeyShot, for example, CAD-focused desktop machines, the same we found the fans cycled from can’t be said of the GPU. The Quadro M620 is very much an entry-level 3D GPU. But this doesn’t mean it’s not suitable for 3D CAD or BIM. Indeed, while our benchmark scores show it to be significantly slower than the fastest GPUs you can expect to find in a SFF workstation — the Nvidia Quadro P1000 or AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100, for example — in practice we found it to be a very capable 3D graphics card. However, it is important to acknowledge its limitations. The bulk of our tests were done at FHD (1,920 x 1,080) resolution. In shaded with edges mode in SolidWorks 2015 we had a perfectly good experience with all our test mod1 els, recording frame rates in excess of 20 FPS. The Z2 Mini even kept pace when RealView was enabled on low to high every 30 secthe PC computer model onds, or so. The noise taken from the SPECapc would actually be less for SolidWorks 2015 benchnoticeable if the fans remained on high for mark. However, the machine did become the duration of the render. Hopefully this sluggish when we switched on Ambient might be remedied in a later BIOS update. Occlusion, something that wouldn’t happen with a more powerful GPU like the The power inside Radeon Pro WX 4100. We had a generally good experience in The Z2 Mini features a combination of desktop and mobile technologies. It has a Autodesk Revit, but this came as no surdesktop CPU — Intel Xeon E3-1200 v6 or prise as this ‘BIM’ application is very
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