HP Z440 does not like it's new ECC memory...

[woutervddn]

So we've got a couple of HP Z440 workstations at the office.

One of them was rendering an image using its 1080TI when suddenly things went wonky. 

 

Turns out the PCIE nvme drive was nearly full and with 'only' 16GBs of storage it really needed a place to keep the information (22GBs of it) before it could be handed over to our 1080TI.

So, naturally we upgraded the RAM. To make sure we could keep going the same day I sacrificed another machine, took it's 2x8GB memory sticks and crammed it in the first Z440. Things went smooth.

 

A few days later the new RAM got delivered in the mail: 
2 sticks of Kingston ValueRAM 8 GB ECC DDR4-2400 (KVR24E17S8/8, ValueRAM)

 

When I inserted it our Z440 it gave me 5 beeps. The product information gave me following info: 'memory error'... (well, thanks for that...)

The same problem happened when I placed it in our other Z440.

 

Now I checked the original memory: 2133MHz instead of the 2400MHz of the new ones. Both however are supported speeds, the manual just states that it'll run at the lowest speed of both.

Even more, the same memory is listed on some other sites online as being compatible with the Z440. To the best of my knowledge even the timing on both sets of RAM are the same.

The inserted position is also as described in the manual.

 

Naturally I thought it might be a bios issue, so I upgraded it to the latest version: No success...

Thinking that maybe 1 of the sticks was broken, I decided to place only 1 of them and swap it afterwards: No success...

 

As a last resort I called the HP helpdesk (thank god for 'professional grade' material..). The guy claimed it was probably another hardware failure and adviced me to run the Bios built in 5 hour test.

I said to him that I couldn't get to there with the memory installed as it didn't even sents data to the screen. He adviced me to run the test with the original memory in place.

 

5 hours later: congratulations, tests passed with flying colors. And I still no step ahead.

 

And so I turn to you my friends, the people who are the person that every HP support advisory wants to be...

Any guesses on why this doesn't fly? And/or how to solve this issue?

 

 

[samcool55]

My guess it's a whitelist issue. OEM's are known to do this.

 

Basically what this means is that the BIOS has a list of RAM that it wants to work with. If there's RAM detected that's NOT in the list, it will say "F-you" and stop working.

Also i think the dude at the helpdesk doesn't know much...

 

And it also explains why the RAM from another Z440 works just fine.

 

edit: what i would do is send the RAM you bought back and get the EXACT same ram that's already in the system. At least if that's possible...

[woutervddn]

On 7/20/2017 at 3:51 PM, samcool55 said:

edit: what i would do is send the RAM you bought back and get the EXACT same ram that's already in the system. At least if that's possible...

Yeah... I was trying to do that in the first place but they weren't selling it anymore where I looked and our regular IT dude is on holiday for 3 weeks...

 

My thoughts about the Helpdesk dude where the same. Where should I find a list of whitelisted RAM? I looked online and in the user manual, but I can only find 'supported configurations'.

 

Also, the Kingstonstore listed the newly bought modules as compatible.

[woutervddn]

So I just got of the phone again with the professional support of HP.

 

"Just bad luck" on choosing this memory. No clear indication why it shouldn't work.

I asked for a memory "whitelist" so I don't have this again: "Let me ask my supervisor" got answered with "I'm sorry, such a list does not exist."

 

When I asked how I made sure this didn't happen again she said: "I don't think that there is a way to be 100% certain."

I suggested that might look for the exact same memory sticks: "That's probably a good idea" she answered...

 

Luckily I found a webshop in a neighboring country that sells the exact same memory as I used to have for a price that isn't double of other ECC memory.

I ordered their last 2 modules...

 

I'm pretty much done with "workstation grade" material now. While the woman from the helpdesk (this time) was a lot nicer and seemed to have more common sense than the guy I talked to last week, she wasn't able to fix my issue (Not her fault though). But since the price we paid for these systems I did expect the professional support to be a whole lot better. At no point anyone asked me the exact type number of the new or the old memory. 

 

While I'll be recommending our next render station to be a normal desktop with a 7700K or a Ryzen 1700X to accompany the 1080TI without ECC memory instead of buying another workstation, I still want to figure out why this didn't work. So I tagged both HP and Kingston on twitter to help me figure it out. I'm hoping the'll take the effort to answer it: