HP Z600 old workstations for use with LinuxCNC
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29 Aug 2025 19:55 #334117
by tommylight
HP Z600 old workstations for use with LinuxCNC was created by tommylight
Yesterday i got 5 of Z600 workstations, as life would have after a friend gave one for free to me as i service and maintain his laptops and PC from time to time, i asked for the price as he had another 7 home collecting dust, and after quite a bit of back and forth (and bickering) we agreed on another 4 for 100 Euro total, making it 25 Euro a piece! 
Wasted yesterday evening and night, and today all day testing and installing those, organizing memory modules (several types of several sizes on all of them) ended up 4 having 16GB of ECC RAM and one having 24GB of ECC RAM and some left over 2GB and 1GB modules, all have 128GB SSD and some have and assortment of spinning HDD's from 80GB to 500GB, all have old NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards that now seem pathetic compared to a GTX1060/6GB or RX580/8GB that i promptly switched to on two of them, all have 2 of Xeon 4 core CPU's at 2.4GHz, and proprietary 650W power supply with a single 6 pin VGA power connector, and all weigh in at over 20KG !!!
So far tested with Linux Mint 22.1 and LinuxCNC 2.10 on 6.13 RT kernel, all have very good latency from short test i did. Will do more tests and also add a parallel port to one to test with as they do have PCI slots.
Have to go to the shop and finish 2 more installs, so for now i leave you with this:
Do NOT buy raspberry PI, buy everything else.

Wasted yesterday evening and night, and today all day testing and installing those, organizing memory modules (several types of several sizes on all of them) ended up 4 having 16GB of ECC RAM and one having 24GB of ECC RAM and some left over 2GB and 1GB modules, all have 128GB SSD and some have and assortment of spinning HDD's from 80GB to 500GB, all have old NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards that now seem pathetic compared to a GTX1060/6GB or RX580/8GB that i promptly switched to on two of them, all have 2 of Xeon 4 core CPU's at 2.4GHz, and proprietary 650W power supply with a single 6 pin VGA power connector, and all weigh in at over 20KG !!!
So far tested with Linux Mint 22.1 and LinuxCNC 2.10 on 6.13 RT kernel, all have very good latency from short test i did. Will do more tests and also add a parallel port to one to test with as they do have PCI slots.
Have to go to the shop and finish 2 more installs, so for now i leave you with this:
Do NOT buy raspberry PI, buy everything else.
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29 Aug 2025 21:33 #334126
by unknown
Replied by unknown on topic HP Z600 old workstations for use with LinuxCNC
My RPi5 is working great on the mill, no performance issues, but not the best bang for buck performance wise
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29 Aug 2025 21:35 #334127
by unknown
Replied by unknown on topic HP Z600 old workstations for use with LinuxCNC
It's funny my Lenovo ThinkCentre is a better performing than the ThinkStation from the same era.
Looking to get a quad core i7 for the T530 and see how that goes
But good find old mate
Looking to get a quad core i7 for the T530 and see how that goes
But good find old mate
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