Campus Station 2025b

Team Compute compute station
1

HP Z2 G4 Small Form Factor

For the year 2025, our reference Campus Stations are based on refurbished computers.

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Most computers produced since 2015 are suitable for REUSE as campus stations. The low-cost "HP Z2 G4 Small Form Factor" is one such computer and we have selected it to be our Campus Station 2025b.

1. Models

There multiple models under the same " HP Z2 Small Form Factor G4 Workstation" name. For example:

You can use the serial number to get the exact mode:
https://support.hp.com/au-en/drivers/desktops

They all seem to share the same BIOS, so the technical support should be the same.

2. Documentation

2

Prices

2024-12-18

As of 2024-12-18, refurbished units of the HP Z2 G4 Small Form Factor model with E-2136 CPU, 32GB ECC RAM and 512GB NVMe with 1 year warranty are available on eBay for just AU$335 (including tax and shipping).

That is CHEAPER and FASTER than most mini-PCs with 32GB RAM ... although those mini-PCs include wifi and bluetooth, they have poor themo performance and do NOT include 6 core (12 threads) CPU, out-of-band remote management, PCI expansion slots etc.

The E-2136 CPU is paired with a C246 chipset with AMT support.

They mixed ECC RAM (Hynix HMA41GU7AFR8N-TF) with non-ECC RAM (Kingston 9965669-009.A00G) and both types are low speed DDR4 2133MHz (below the DDR 2666MHz supported by the CPU)

4

AMT BIOS

A major benefit of this model is the Intel AMT feature in the BIOS.

No Remote Display

Some models come with a CPU (e.g. E-2136) that does NOT have an integrated GPU, instead the machine normally comes with an external GPU (e.g. Nvidia) plugged in.

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Since there is no GPU inside the CPU, the AMT remote graphic display function CANNOT be used.

5

Storage

The bundled 512GB NVMe SSD is typically from Western Digital
with model number SN730

The TBW on these SSDs is 300TB while the refurbished units we received normally has around 24TB already written.

6

Upgrades

The "standard" specifications are good enough to be used as is as a compute station, but if required upgrades can be done easily.

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We normally perform the following 4 upgrades to these low-cost units:

  1. add NVMe SSD for Containers to complement existing SATA SSD for OS.
  2. add second ethernet (2.5Gbps PCIe) to separate network traffic and provide redundancy.
  3. add DisplayPort dummy to enable remote console access.

M.2 E-Key

The M.2 E-Key slot can be used by a number of peripherals, but since the computer case does NOT have WiFi antennas, the typical use case of putting in WiFi/Bluetooth does not apply here. The slot can be used for other E-Key devices (e.g. Google AI) instead.

SATA HDD

With the extra bandwidth provided by an additional 2.5Gbps ethernet card, it is an option to add extra SATA HDDs, so the machine can act as a storage node for other machines.