How to upgrade the power supply in HP Z840 to 1125W PSU | Don't make my mistake!

hi guys welcome to the artist server so i got myself this hp z840 workstation and this is going to be my primary workstation going forward but i made a mistake and that is i got a really good deal for this i think i paid about 450 for this thing bare bones and i was going to add my own processor and ram and that kind of stuff but one of the reasons why this unit i guess was uh so cheap was that it has the 850 watt power supply and normally you would think 850 watts that's pretty decent amount right well it turns out when you have the 850 watt power supply it only comes with one 6 pin gpu pcie power connector and the graphics card i want to use is going to require more than that and so i thought well you know how hard could it be to upgrade the power supply because hp does provide a 11 25 watt uh power supply for this hp z840 i figured i could just buy the power supply and swap it in and i'd be good to go well it wasn't going to be that simple i found out that in order to swap the higher wattage uh power supply the 11 25 watt version and to gain those additional pcie power connectors for the gpu i'm actually going to have to swap out uh quite a few components to make it work and so today i'm going to make a video showing you guys how to upgrade your hp z840 with the 1125 watt power supply in case you also have an 850 watt power supply and you're looking to do this upgrade now that said if you are shopping for an hp z840 i recommend that you just look for one that already has the 1125 watt power supply and that will save you all the hassle hunting for the parts that are needed to do this upgrade i will leave the details and part numbers in the video description so that if you are looking to do this upgrade of your power supply in the hp z840 you'll have all the part numbers you need to shop for all the components you need for this upgrade i will say though some of these components are a little bit hard to find and that's why i said if you are shopping for an hp z840 it is better off to just buy one that already has the 11 25 watt power supply all right so let's get started by showing you what's wrong with this hp z840 when it only has the 850 watt power supply okay so when you have the 850 watt version of the hp z840 this here is the only pcie power connector for the gpu that is provided so it is a six pin connector now if you have a normal pc you know that a six pin connector provides up to 75 watts of power to your gpu and if you have an 8 pin connector it would provide up to 150 watts of power to your gpu and a lot of modern gpus require both connectors either a 6 pin and 6 pin or a 6 6 pin and 8 pin or sometimes even two eight pins now this six pin connector is actually a little bit different in this hpc 840. this connector can actually provide up to 150 watts all by itself if you read the power supply ratings it can provide up to 18 amps at 12.2 volts which is a little bit over 200 watts so although this is only a 6 pin pcie connector it is actually capable of providing up to 150 watts so you can actually convert this 6-pin connector to an 8-pin connector and have it provide up to 150 watts as well since this rail actually can provide about 200 plus watts however if you have a gpu that requires more than the six pin or just a single eight pin this is obviously not going to be enough to power your gpu and the one that i'm planning to use is going to require a six pin and eight pin connector so this is definitely not enough when you upgrade the power supply it does not have the other connectors to provide power this is actually one thing that i wish hp would have done is to put the wire harness in here and maybe just label them as hey you know these connectors are not usable unless you upgrade the power supply but instead they cheaped out and they decided not to provide the additional cabling that would have made this power supply upgrade much easier so today we're going to have to swap out this wire harness in order to gain the additional pcie power connections as well as the the power supply itself and one other gotcha that i will tell you about shortly alright guys so in order to do the 25 watt power supply upgrade for the hp z840 these are all the components and tools we're going to need now normally this workstation doesn't require any tools to do any kind of maintenance and swap parts but unfortunately for this particular upgrade you will need some tools so in particular there is a t15 torx screwdriver that's going to be required in order to remove the back cover so that we can swap out the wire harness and in addition to that this is something i'm not really sure so it's a seven millimeter deep well socket uh that's a quarter inch drive socket there isn't a bolt or uh nut that i need to remove but i'm actually going to be using this to help remove the wire harness connection in the back where the power supply plugs in so i'm not really sure this is going to work but i think it will so we're going to try this out okay so this here is a 92 millimeter fan for the hp z840 there are at least six locations in the hp z840 that uses this particular fan two of them go for the rear exhaust there's one each for each cpu and then the the front of the pci slots have two spots for a fan of this size now normally there is only one fan installed but when you have the 1125 watt a power supply the system is expecting that you're going to be installing a more powerful pci graphics card and that you will be generating more heat and pcie areas so it does require you or at least it will issue a warning that it doesn't see a second fan in the pcie cage area and so in order to get rid of that warning you have to install a second fan in the pcie cage area that we'll get into later on all right so this is the extra wire harness that provides you can see here let me take it out of the bag this is the wire harness that's going to go into the back and this is where the power supply plugs in the one that's currently in the system is basically missing all the all the pins here and so it only has these six pins for that one six pin connection this one has as you can see three of the six pins those g1 g2 and g3 six six pin uh connectors now again these are designed to handle up to 18 amps at 12.2 volts so each one of these can easily handle 150 watts and you can convert the six pin connection to an eight pin connection using a high quality adapter and this is an official hp one you don't have to use the official hp one but you do want to use a a high quality adapter so that it can handle the connection correctly so this is a six pin to eight pin connector and i'm going to be needing a six pin and eight pin for the gpu that i plan to use so this will be the perfect setup and i'll have one extra six pin for future expansion or maybe if i add a second gpu that only requires a six pin all right so this is the harness that we're going to have to swap out and i will leave the part number to this wire harness in the video description so that if you are looking to do this upgrade you'll be able to find the parts you need and by the way the links in my video description will be uh ebay search links that are affiliate links and so if you do your ebay shopping with my links that'll help the channel out and i'll greatly appreciate that okay so finally of course for the psu upgrade you're going to need a new power supply and this in particular is the 11 25 watt power supply now this actually can provide even higher wattage if the input voltage is higher so you can see here that if you can provide uh between 200 to 240 volts of input power then this actually can output up to 1450 watts but on a standard 100 volt well actually that's not standing in the us but like in japan um we have 100 volt power that will give you 11 25 watts and i guess in the united states we tend to have somewhere between uh 115 to 120 volt power that will provide up to 1275 watts in this power supply all right so those are the components we're going to need to do the upgrade so let's go ahead and open this guy up and start the upgrade process all right first thing first let's open the machine and we're going to gut this machine not entirely but there's several components we want to remove before we do this upgrade so i'm going to remove this cover to the pci slot area i'm also going to remove the fan assembly for the cpu cooling all right so and also let's remove the power supply so this is the 850 watt power supply and as you can see here there is a 12 volt g1 18 amps and so that's that one connection for the graphics card and that's about all it supplies [Music] okay so over here this connection right here in the power supply bay that's the one that we're going to have to remove in order to get that new harness in there that will provide the additional uh six pin connectors for the gpu all right so now before i get started one thing i want to remove right now is actually the pcie fan cage up here okay so before we get started in swapping out the wire harness and the power supply i do recommend that you go ahead and remove this fan cage here and that's for two reasons one is that we're going to have to remove the existing wire harness to swap it with the one that has the additional gpu power connections and there's not a lot of room here for this to be pulled out so i want to make a little extra room and also again we are going to have to install a second fan otherwise the system is going to throw an error saying that there's not enough fans in the system for the higher wattage power supply so let's go ahead and remove this cage and you do that by simply pressing on where these two green areas are so just press down on that and this should rotate out and just have to kind of play with it a little bit there we go all right and so before i pull it all the way out you'll notice uh the fan connector here is plugged in so i'm going to go ahead and pull that out okay and you'll notice that there's two of them and that's for the second fan that we're going to install later on okay so now that we have the fan cage out and we'll put that fan the extra fan in the slot right here later on and wire it up but you'll notice that there's the slot right here on the motherboard tray that opens to the rear side or the back side of this chassis and that's where we're going to have to install that wire harness and we're going to remove this harness and so i just want to make a little bit more room here in order for me to build pull this out later on when we remove the back cover all right so let's go ahead and remove the back cover okay so i've got the z840 laying on its side here with the back side and this is where the motherboard tray is facing the top and there are two torx 15 screws one here and one over here and those are the screws that's holding this panel in place so we have to remove those first okay with the screws removed this panel basically slides down and this can be very very tough i'm going to try to do it with one hand but yeah usually this is very hard all right so i can't seem to make it budge and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn this around i'm going to have something that's basically uh bracing the the bottom half of this so that i can use my full uh use both hands to to apply more force to remove this panel all right so i've got this machine turned around so the bottom side now is up here and i have this kind of surge protector power thing i'm going to use that to kind of give me a little bit of room between here and the wall in front of us so i'm going to just kind of press that up against that and i'm going to use both hands to kind of move this panel down that way okay so that's how you get this panel removed it's actually usually very very tight tightly in there so all right so with the rear panel off we can see these are the connections for to the power supply i believe it's this one it goes down here there's a bit of wood chips in my computer um goes down here over here and so this here is that gpu connection and so hopefully we have a little bit of clearance here for me to pull this out okay so here's that uh g1 um gpu harness or power harness that we're gonna be removing so i'm just gonna try to snake it through all the zip ties here without having to actually redo the zip ties hopefully i can do that if not we'll cut the zip ties all right looks like we might have to cut the zip ties yeah okay i'm gonna have to cut the zip ties so let me go get some new zip ties and uh some cutters to cut these off all right guys i'm back here with uh a few zip ties that i'll use when i after i cut these off and so here are my cutters let's go ahead and so i guess as an addendum to either parts list for this upgrade make sure you have some extra zip ties all right so that should be enough to get this harness out now the challenging part is going to be this uh adapter or whatever you want to call the plastic it basically holds all these pins into this sheet metal so that it can engage with the power supply on the other side and that's where i'm going to use this seven millimeter deep socket to try to remove this from the other side so let me flip this machine over and we'll get over there all right guys so this is the from the in looking from the inside that's the connector that we're going to remove and it has these plastic things that kind of look sort of like wings that are holding on uh that hole and so we're gonna have to compress these and that's where i'm gonna use the socket to basically squeeze those wings together and hope that that'll allow it to go through the hole and then i can remove this so i'm going to use this it's a seven millimeter deep socket and i'm just going to squeeze it while twisting it over those wings and i'm hoping that then i can just pull from the other side here and maybe oh yeah that's probably okay there you go so that actually worked great so yeah this is the first time i'm doing this so i wasn't really sure if that was gonna work but it seems to work just fine so again i'm gonna do with the other side i'm just gonna twist it and compress those plastic wings and to give it a little bit of tug from the back side see if i can pull that out okay this side is being a little bit more stubborn let's i need something oh here i think it's oh there we go all right awesome all right so there it is so so i was basically using the socket to compress these little wings here and basically i was kind of twisting it on like this and um basically compressing those things so that it could then go through the hole in the back uh right there all right so that worked out so now we've got the old harness out we're going to put in the new harness all right so here's the new harness and i believe it only goes in one way so it should go in this way and i'll just i'll try to push it in this way i think installing it is going to be a lot easier because as you press as you press it in those wings are naturally going to compress through the holes and then spread out and hold on so yeah there you go that's all it is the insulation is obviously a lot simpler and easier all right let me flip this back um facing down and then we'll get the cables all um tied up with the zip ties all right so i have the power connector in there already i'm gonna basically route this exactly how it was before and get it through hopefully these holes here to get the three gpu connectors to the other side all right so let's just zip tie this stuff up i'm going to try to spread this out a little bit to kind of make sure it's flat because there's not a lot of space once the cover goes on and i don't want the cover to compress this too much all right i think that's good go ahead and cut that off all right so obviously a lot more cables on this side here and the zip tie goes right there and again i'm going to try to spread this out just a little bit so that i don't have too much thickness with all the cabling here in one spot all right and go ahead and cut that off all right so what remains is just to snake these through the hole so i can access or have them available on the other side i'll start with g1 so i'm just going to try to go through the larger opening here we'll do these one at a time so all right let's flip this over and see what we have on the other side [Music] all right so the three connectors came out fine that looks good and and i kind of like the fact that they're coming through this bigger opening it just feels like it's easier to maneuver and so that yeah just kind of seeing if that's enough length to well maybe do i want to go underneath here perhaps because i feel like it's tugging it's being held behind these larger cables so let me kind of put them underneath here and route them this way there we go so i think maybe that might be a little bit better or better yet not underneath sas cables there okay so i think yeah this might be better so let me go ahead and do the same for the other okay so there's g2 and then the final all right so those are our new gpu connections when we plug in the 1125 watt power supply okay so let's go i'm going to flip this back facing down again and put on the back cover and make sure that we can actually close that back cover okay so i'm hoping that this isn't going to be too thick for the cover to close properly it is a little bit more cabling than what we had earlier but you know this is a original hp factory cable so hopefully everything should work just fine all right so here is the back cover and let's see here okay so just as we removed it having this uh power brick here provide some support on the bottom while i pushed it i'm gonna reverse the process turn this around okay so i'm going to brace the chassis against that power brick and from this end i'm just going to i believe all the little balls are engaged in the holes and so i'm just going to press on this and hopefully get it pushed back in there we go yeah so yeah i believe i got it all the way in all right and then we just have to install those two screws back so again that's with a t15 torx screwdriver [Applause] it doesn't have to be super tight just all the way down snug all right that's it all right let's flip this around [Music] all right so we have the gpu connections in there now let's get that fan the additional fan and the fan cage installed and get all this put back together all right so here's the fan cage that goes right in here and the factory default was to have at least one fan in here now if you have the model that already has the 1125w power supply you should have a second fan because it will complain about the second fan not being connected so i do have here an extra fan that i got and i'm going to install this this part should be fairly easy and tool-less now of course you can install this in many ways i'm trying to minimize the length of cable that's going to be sticking out so instead of having it for example installed this way and having all this length of cable sticking out um i'm gonna try to run it twist this a little bit so i'll have the maybe just that much see what the factory one was yeah pretty short there so i think that should be um more than enough the connectors are just right there so they're very very close so you don't really need a long length of cable there all right so to install this let me just kind of hold the cable there it looks like there are two little prongs here and then something that looks like it'll just clip on over there so i think i just need to put them be not behind those and let me just route this cable over here for now and there's also a little cable i'll hold it right here so i'll put it right under there and i should be able to just press this in and there you go all right so that's simple enough this part was completely tool-less and that's kind of great all right so i have these two plugs now that will plug in right there and that's the second one seems to be a little bit shorter but i don't think that's going to be a big deal all right so putting this back in can sometimes be a little bit tricky there are these little square holes back here and these tabs right here need to be in those holes before you start closing this in so hopefully you can see that these four tabs here need to be in those four square holes right here here here and here alright so let me just slide this in and so you're probably not going to be able to see this but basically i'm trying to maneuver those tabs into those square holes and once they're in you can kind of just slide this in and press it until i think that's yeah i think that's in so let me just double check here pull out the drive bays and make sure that this here is yeah there we go so that's definitely in let me remove this one too all right so yeah it looks like everything is properly in there let me now the drive sleds back in [Music] all right so all i have to do now is oh you know what i made a slight mistake this sata cable is now kind of pinched underneath there and i really like that so let me remove this again and make sure that sata cable is not pinched in there all right hopefully i didn't damage it or anything now it looks like it's okay but you know i don't like to have pinched cable so let me just move that out of the way and let's try this again all right there we go and let's make sure all right all right so now i just have to plug in these fan connectors so i'll do this bottom one first so the bottom one goes to the bottom one [Music] and the top one goes to the top one all right so that's all there is to it let me just put the sata cable kind of roughly where it was before and now we have the three gpu power cables and by the way this fan cage does have these little rectangular holes here that are meant to hold these cables in place when you're they're not in use and so i'm going to go ahead and do that right now because i don't have my gpu with me right now yet so these just plug in right there and there and there so kind of a nice place to hold those cables while they're not in use all right so the only thing left now is to put the new power supply in its place all right guys so we're at the final step here where we install the new 11 25 watt power supply which goes right in there and as you can see hopefully you can see the shining pins right there those additional pins are now in place for those gpu connections all right so let's go ahead and slide this in and make sure that the handle is disengaged first and as we press it in then we can lock the handle in place and there we go all right so that's it we've got the power supply in the new harness in the additional fan in the pcie fan cage here and that should allow the new 11 25 watt power supply to work and give me the connections i need for the graphics card i'm planning to install and the extra fan will prevent the system from basically bugging me that there's a missing fan all right guys so that's it for today's video hope this was helpful but again if you are shopping for a z840 hopefully you don't make the same mistake i did and just simply go get one that already has the 1125 watt power supply now if you didn't uh do that and you did need to do this upgrade hopefully this video was helpful to you again i'm going to leave all the part number details down in the video description below and they will be affiliate links to search ebay for those parts so if you use those links to do your shopping that'll definitely help out my channel so i'd really appreciate that anyway guys if you like this video make sure to give me that thumbs up and if you want to see more videos about hp workstations and other workstations be sure to subscribe to my channel also if you'd like to support my channel i do have an ebay store where i sell all sorts of computer and server parts so please go check those out i'll leave a link to the ebay store down in the video description below as well all right thank you very much guys and have a good day bye

Channel: Art of Server

Views: 4,377

Keywords:

Id: HKSc5l0cvsw

Length: 34min 49sec (2089 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021