I have an HP Z640 workstation that I have pressed into service as a proxmox host. I am not doing GPU pass through and would love to be able to run this without the included Nvidia Quadro card that it came with, just to lower the idle power draw and free up a PCIe slot. Unfortunately, the bios won't post when the GPU is removed. The system gives an error beep, displays the red LED power button (an error message) and then shuts down. If I re-install the GPU all returns to normal. Is there a hack or a workaround to enable this machine to run headless?
HP Z640 Headless Boot??
- Thread starter louie1961
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does your cpu have igpu? if it does check your bios to enable it, if not...... you need your gpu
its always going to be power hungry even without a gpu though
its always going to be power hungry even without a gpu though
No I am running a xeon E5-2690v3. With 5 SSD drives and 2 NVMe drives and 64gb of ram, I have gotten my overall idle power consumption down to 58 watts. I can probably knock off another 10 or 15 watts.
If the slot is really open ended, it will allow the card to stick out past the physical connector.
I do this with Z840's the big brother to Z640. I use a crappy quadro card like K620 (worth $10) on the X1 PCIe slot and get a power draw of <15W from the low end quadro card. Also, these cards can run 24/7 as they're supposed to be professional cards.
You can reduce power consumption by reducing NVMe drives, especially if they're U.2 or PCIe cards. Older models will consume 10W idle and 25W usage. SATA will always use less wattage. How about increasing the size of the SATA drives and getting rid of the NVMe? Also, if you go with a v4, with less cores/clock you should be able to reduce this more. 90v3 is over kill with only 64GB ram. You'll never reach full CPU usage, but you'll easily cap out on ram with virtualization. Go with E5-2680v4, these are like 15 bucks on ebay and are only max 120W TDP or even a E5-2618Lv4 - 75W max TDP.
You can reduce power consumption by reducing NVMe drives, especially if they're U.2 or PCIe cards. Older models will consume 10W idle and 25W usage. SATA will always use less wattage. How about increasing the size of the SATA drives and getting rid of the NVMe? Also, if you go with a v4, with less cores/clock you should be able to reduce this more. 90v3 is over kill with only 64GB ram. You'll never reach full CPU usage, but you'll easily cap out on ram with virtualization. Go with E5-2680v4, these are like 15 bucks on ebay and are only max 120W TDP or even a E5-2618Lv4 - 75W max TDP.
In my re-purposed workstations, I use the Matrox G550 video cards - They are 1x natively, dual DVI, and supposed to be under 8W idle IIRC though I have never measured it.
Edit: The specific model is: Matrox G55-MDDE32F F7229 G550 - Like this: Matrox G55-MDDE32F F7229-00 32MB Graphic Card | eBay
Edit: The specific model is: Matrox G55-MDDE32F F7229 G550 - Like this: Matrox G55-MDDE32F F7229-00 32MB Graphic Card | eBay
I wonder if this would work on the Zx40 series (it did on my Z420):
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HP has a very nifty (pair of) UNSUPPORTED tool(s) for configuring (and updating) the BIOS directly from the Linux command-line, as root. See [Link].
Using it, I was able to set both a Z440 and a Z4 G4 to Headless Boot, and have removed their graphics cards. It looks like (almost?) all future BIOS SetUp configuring can now be done, directly, via Linux. I haven't yet tested the Flash tool (bothworkstations "servers" are on latest BIOS), but I feel confident.
Additional insight/ideas can be found here [Link].
Using it, I was able to set both a Z440 and a Z4 G4 to Headless Boot, and have removed their graphics cards. It looks like (almost?) all future BIOS SetUp configuring can now be done, directly, via Linux. I haven't yet tested the Flash tool (both
Additional insight/ideas can be found here [Link].