Brian1965,
I apologize for the long delay in replying. It was never explained, but since 3 August I was not allowed to sign in and I concluded that my forum account / registration had been deleted. Perhaps too much off topic posting? In the end, last evening I created a new account.
I enjoyed your description of the audio side of your system- very good choices and the results are highly professional- really excellent. Often on computer forums, there is so much focus on a single problem or upgrade, one never sees for what these systems are used.
Your z620 seems to be going from strength to stronger. You mentioned variability in the Passmarks results. Over time and testing of many systems, I've seen this too and I think it has to do with the processes that are running at the time of the test. i've had updates notices pop up during the test, and have run the test with certain programs running in the background and these seems to impact the results.
In my news, I updated the z620 BIOS to 3.88. This, I have to say doesn't look correct, as starting now, it goes through a storm of quickly flashing screens including a list of drives and prompt to configure RAID and etc. Extremely messy. this may have to do with the ancient hard drives, but I would like to solve that situation in some way. Does you z620 have this dog's dinner of screens called "American Megatrends"? Or perhaps for you, "U.K Highly Populars"? It's very annoying and may in fact not be properly done.
I've bought an HP Z Turbo 256GB AHCI which uses the Samsung SM951 - with a large heatsink added and is supposed to have better performance than an SM951 on a third party adapter card. The one I bought was taken from a new HP z - series and as soon as I popped it in and started the system, Windows 7 appeared, "Starting your computer for the first time". Encouraging to occasionally have something work unexpectedly well. The Z Turbo has the more modern GPT in place of MBR partitioning and I need to look a bit more into the implications of that. GPT does recognize drives over 2TB and can have many, many partitions- I think they can be as small as 2MB- without the extended partition bodge of MBR set ups to have more than 4 partitions per drive and the drive information is distributed, as compared to MBR being all in one place. If the MBR is corrupted the drive can't be read. If a GPT drive has trouble, it can use the duplicated drive information and recover.
My dilemma is to whether I might setup the drive on the z620 and then transfer it to the z420. Then, I could clone the Z Turbo to the Intel 730 that will go into the z620 and be done. This would mean that I could work out the drive carefully on the 620 without interrupting work on the 420. The z420 and z620 share the same BIOS- or rather the z420 currently has 3.84- not 3.88 and these days, Windows is activated automatically to the system, so there's no fuss about the Windows key. When finished, I would try to transfer the Intel 730 to the z620 and with a Passmark disk rating of 4794 that should wake up the 620 a bit from the Seagate that scores 574.
I also bought a couple of HP 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapters as in the z620 the data and power connections have to be precisely located to plug in with the quick change drive caddy. In the z420, the SSD must be also precisely located as the 3- drive power connector cable is so stiff it puts a lot of pressure on the SSD if it's centered in the caddy on a conventional adapter. the SSD must be in the left front corner. At the time as I couldn't find a suitable adapter, I designed one and a friend cut it out of acrylic on a laser. Even used, these things are expensive. What are you using for your SanDisk SSD in the z620?
Cheers,
BambiBoom_Z