HP Z420 upgrade CPU to i9?
Hey guys,
This is a bit off normal topic but there isn't many places where people discuss HpZ420.
I work in post production as a trailer editor. My boss is asking if we can upgrade the CPU's to handle 4K. Now Ideally I would suggest just buy new towers, but he wants to explore the option of upgrading these systems.
I would like to toss a i9 chip in there. I assume i'm going to need a new motherboard for that to work. Is there any reason I couldn't upgrade this tower to a newer chip with a new MB? We have 10 stations here with the specs below.
HP Z420
Windows 10
500 GB SSD
1TB Spin HD
32GB Ram
Intel E5-1650 V2 CPU
Fibre channel card
Black Magic I/O card
Thanks.
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The cpu you've listed should be more than adequate to handle 4k. A higher spec graphics card will improve matters. More RAM will help, along with a NVMe m.2 card running Windows off that, but you're going to find it extremely difficult (if at all) to find a different brand of motherboard to fit in the HP proprietary chassis, and for the price of them it would hardly be worthwhile.
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This might be helpful: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/4k/4k-video-editing-hp-z-series-workstations
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I will be using Adobe Premiere for the editing, the preview and cache files will be stored locally but all of the media is on the server and comes through the fibre channel card. When cutting trailer we usually get a 1080p quicktime of the films, but its when we get sent all the dailies from the film and especially if any footage is in 4k it just doesn't run well and it's difficult to scrub the footage quickly.
I believe the way premiere runs, upgrading the graphics card won't help as much since as Jbig mentioned I believe its more intensive on the CPU which is why I was curious about upgrading that.
This was the system I initially suggested to my boss. https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/genesis/I/customize.php
Thanks for the comments guys!
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Before you completely ditch the z420, I would definitely give them a showering of upgrades since the upgrades would be cheap at this point. I would add in an additional nvme ssd via a pci card, upgrade the video card to something much, much faster (you can easily get one that is 10x faster), upgrade the cpu to the e5-2687w v2 for 2 more cores and a little boost on the single thread performance:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-1650-v2-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2687W-v2/2066vs2045
and finally, upgrade ram to either 128gb or 256gb to be able to do more right in memory. I think with these upgrades, those z420s will seem like brand new. And the good thing is that aside from the cpu and memory, all the other upgrades can move to new systems when that ultimately is needed.