HP brings powerful workstations after feedback from users

Sep 30, 2015 10:25 GMT  ·  By
The new Z240 workstation PC fom HP is made with workstation users in mind
3 photos
   The new Z240 workstation PC fom HP is made with workstation users in mind

In case you need a mean machine at your office to do some serious data processing, you shouldn't skip this new workstation desktop PC from Hewlett-Packard that comes with Xeon Skylake CPU and DDR4 support.

These days, probably every Skylake platform comes with DDR4 memory standard, and the new HP workstations aren't any different. The HP Z240 Tower and the Z240 SFF (small form factor) workstations work on Intel's Core i7/i5 or Xeon E3-1200 v5-series “Skylake” CPUs in the well-known LGA 1151 form-factor and the Intel C236 core-logic. The devices can support up to a whopping 64GB PC4-17000 DDR4 memory, and obviously, can be further upgraded with an HP Z Turbo Drive 2 SSD, which is basically the old Samsung SM951 with PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.

Additionally, there are four Serial ATA-6Gb/s SSDs or hard disk drives, and a professional graphics card from AMD or NVIDIA can be added as well in the PCIe 3.0 slots. Apparently, the new changes brought to the new computers come after feedback from actual workstation users, and after understanding the typical workflow of a real workstation user, HP has implemented a lot of new design features to fix the previous existing issues.

Powerful, ergonomic and quite professional-looking for an under-$900 price tag

It seems that one of the new improvements HP brought to the new systems is increased compatibility with the motherboard. This way, it has an integrated M.2 slot, together with HPs Z Turbo Drive, and the legacy PCI slot that apparently was used by less than 2% of workstation users was removed, in order to make room for other devices.

What's interesting is that, with the recent improvements and better motherboard design, the end PCB card ended up being smaller than the previous models, which is perfect for more efficient cable layouts. Additionally, on the layout and maintenance side, both the tower and the SFF model can be ordered with dust filters that may improve tremendously the performance of the machines even though they might not seem essential on the surface.

The most basic HP Z240 will come with an Intel Core i5-6500 for the price of $879. While different specs and price models are unknown at the moment, we expect an Core i7 CPU to cross well the $1,000 threshold. Nevertheless, the current offer is good, and if you need a professional computing system, the new Z240 might be your thing.

The new HP Z240 (3 Images)

The new Z240 workstation PC fom HP is made with workstation users in mind
The new HP Z240The new HP Z240
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