Need to replace the AIO liquid CPU coolers on HP Z820

[alex_stief]

It seems like at least one of the liquid CPU coolers on a HP Z820 workstation of mine is gone.
One of the CPUs hits 90°C under load, and the CPU clock speeds decrease below base clock. The CPU heatsink remains cold, telling me that the pump is probably gone.

Checking the used market, these things seem to cost in the range of 200$ a piece. And if I buy this, I still don't know if it is really the pump, or if the header on the motherboard is fried.

Does anyone have experience with replacing these liquid coolers with something different?
My preferred solution would be the Z-cooler from the next generation Z840. But I don't know if it fits within the fan shroud assembly. The benefit here would be that I don't have to live with error messages about missing fans.
The other idea would be to remove the fan shroud entirely, and use small narrow-ILM CPU coolers instead (e.g. Noctua NH-U9DX i4), connected e.g. to a Molex connector from the power supply.

Any thoughts on this, or experience with swapping the coolers.

 

[TRACKER]

Hello,

I was in similar situation last month.
I've bought two of them last month, because both mine failed (one after another in one week period).
Unfortunatelly they are already gone:
HP Liquid Cooling Heatsink Module for Z820 Workstation 635869-002 with bracket | eBay
Those were brand new, unused, for only 86USD
From my perspective, you need liquid coolers only in case your CPUs require it (e.g. TDP 150W). In case you have lower TPD CPUs (e.g. <135W) you could use normal coolers.
Or just buy 2nd hand liquid ones from ebay

 

[alex_stief]

Thermal constraints are not really an issue. The CPUs are Xeon E5-2680v2. And on top of that, I hardly think that these flimsy looking liquid coolers were any better than a moderately priced air cooler.
I think I will go with aftermarket coolers then, and live with the fan warnings.

 

[Deslok]

You should be able to use an air cooler with the header on the mainboard there's typically little(software label, higher capacity possibly) to no difference(they're still 4 pin pwm) between a fan header and a pump header(although if it doesn't work a fan controller is easy enough to add in, not sure i've ever seen one fail though)

 

[alex_stief]

I might be able to use the pump headers, but it would not surprise me if HP went with an unusual pinout for these.
The fan warning comes from the huge plastic shroud over CPUs and memory, which contains no less than 6 fans. And it connects to the motherboard with a connector that is definitely proprietary. With aftermarket CPU coolers installed, this shroud no longer fits.

 

[Deslok]

I might be able to use the pump headers, but it would not surprise me if HP went with an unusual pinout for these.
The fan warning comes from the huge plastic shroud over CPUs and memory, which contains no less than 6 fans. And it connects to the motherboard with a connector that is definitely proprietary. With aftermarket CPU coolers installed, this shroud no longer fits.

Ahh my mistake on what triggers the warning, easy enough to check the pinout with a cheap fan you don't care about burning out though. That's a lot of fans to giveup though, what about something like the supermicro SNK-P0048AP4 or similar, you might be able to just clip the corner to get it to fit, there's some 1u versions as well that might just be short enough to be a non issue overall.

 

[alex_stief]

Just did the cooler swap. I ended up using Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U coolers.
Despite being pretty tiny, they still don't fit under the plastic abomination HP uses to fill up half of the workstation. You could theoretically just remove the two larger fans for the CPUs from it, and saw off a few more parts to make it fit.
I opted to leave the plastic shroud out instead, and just mounted (aka zip-tied) two of the remaining fans with 5V adapters to cool the VRM heatsinks.
For the Noctua fans on the CPU coolers, I used the enclosed ULN adapters and plugged them directly into 12V. The machine is now semi-quiet (most of the noise comes from the other built-in fans) and the hottest CPU goes to around 65°C under full load.
The machine complains about all the missing fans during boot, and I have not found a way to disable the F1 prompt. But I can live with that.