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Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

So how much RAM could be stuffed in one of these?

Edit: The Z2 Mini supports Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, in addition to Xeon E3 processors. It also supports up to 32GB of DDR4 SO-DIMM memory, and the unit can be equipped with Nvidia Quadro M620 graphics with 2GB of memory. (from http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hp-z2-mini-g3-workstation,3...)

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Any idea to which consumer card the Quadro M620 correlates? If it's something halfway decent then it might be a also a much better ultraportable gaming solution for some people than e.g. a NUC. However that also depends on if the Quadro drivers are suitable for gaming or not.

Its desktop variant the K620 performs between a GTX 750 (non-Ti) [1] and a 730 [2], so it doesn't look exceptional. I'd guess around Intel Iris level.

[1] http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-Quadro-K620-vs-N... [2] http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-Quadro-K620-vs-N...

Ok thx, that's quite bad. Had expected more, since some smaller notebooks are now getting 1060s. But then this thing would probably be much more expensive.

Your best bet, other than building your own, is probably a Steam Machine. For around the same price as this workstation you can get one with a better video card.

and ECC RAM!

As someone who has purchased ECC SO-DIMM form factor RAM in the past, it is very much not cheap. (it was basically 4x the cost of ECC DIMM sticks)

That being said, they are more common with DDR4 now.

Trivia: I think the pinout for DDR3 ECC SO-DIMMs are incompatible with the non-ECC ones!

They're not incompatible.

Look at "Pin Assignments" in:

https://www.micron.com/products/datasheets/9790eab7-a778-48a...

https://www.micron.com/products/datasheets/cd774d8b-45be-402...

Sorry, I was being less pedantic than I should have been. Thanks for the correction and have an upvote.

They're "incompatible" in the sense that the pinouts differ, but an ECC-capable DDR3 machine can use both ECC and non-ECC memory; however, the pinout incompatibility means that a non-ECC-capable machine cannot use ECC RAM (but then, who would want to spend the extra $$ for ECC RAM when their machine doesn't support it anyway?).

The SO-DIMM pinouts are different enough that this is not true either.

What can I say? I have two, identical TS140s sitting in the next room. One is running G.Skill non-ECC and the other is running Kingston ECC modules.

Do they use DIMMs or do they use SO-DIMMs?

That seems to have gotten better of late, as more systems use ECC sodimms. Poking around seems to suggest a price difference of $5-$10 a stick, and that's pretty constant regardless of memory size.

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