Editor’s Pick: HP’s Z240 Workstations

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Humpty Dumpty famously said that when he used a word, ”it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” But sometimes dog-eared compound adjectives like “entry-level” choose to get scrambled and no longer mean what you assume they mean. Today's Pick of the Week illustrates that.

HP recently unveiled its new HP Z240 Tower and HP Z240 SFF (small form factor) engineering workstations. HP says the HP Z240 workstations are an upgrade to its popular HP Z230 workstation, citing technological improvements like an integrated M.2 slot for expansion cards and connectors as well as a smaller, more efficient motherboard. The hard-drive cage in the HP Z240 SFF has been re-engineered to provide more efficient airflow.

HP also calls the HP Z240s “entry-level,” which makes sense if you build many of the systems HP does. For end-users, the only thing that appears entry-level is their base price – less than 900 Benjamins. Everything else about these scalable, expandable workstations seems well-suited for extending horsepower to more engineers in the office or for bringing real workstation power home for your after-hours design work. Or both. Your choice.

See, the HP Z240 is highly configurable, so you can choose what “entry-level engineering workstation” means for you. You can rig it up with Intel Core i5-6500 or Core i7-6700 series multicore processors running at more than 3.5GHz. (HP says they'll also support future releases of Intel's Xeon processor E3-1200 v5 family.) You can use Intel HD Graphics 530 with Intel Turbo Boost or leverage an entry-level, mid-range or, in the case of the tower unit, high-end AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Quadro graphic accelerators. Support for multiple displays is available.

The workstations accommodate up to 64GB of memory and a pair of HP's new Z Turbo Drive SSD (solid state drive) storage systems. They run 64-bit Windows or Linux, and the HP Z240s have a USB front fast-charging port, eight USB 3.0 ports and three DisplayPort connections for you to connect stuff to. There's lots of storage and other options to choose from to make the HP Z240 to your liking.

HP has introduced new entry-level engineering workstations, the small form factor HP Z240 SFF (left) and the HP Z240 Tower (right). Image courtesy of HP.

You can learn more about the HP Z240 Tower and HP Z240 SFF workstations from today's Pick of the Week link. Hit the URL at the end of the main write-up to learn more about software certifications, read white papers on the technology they incorporate and play with configurations.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn about the HP Z240 Series here.