SDH wrote:Regarding your mention about the IME firmware upgrade..... that actually is done from the command line interface on even the original motherboard, and it has nothing to do with changing firmware in a fashion that gives one a different boot block date. I wrote up a How-to on that.... the process is a bit fiddly, and some of the posts about that in this forum have said it can't be done, but it is meant to be done if one wants, and I've personally done it. I don't use those IME upgrades.... I'm running in the legacy mode of BIOS, but I just wanted to see if I could do it, and you can see the version number you upgraded to from within BIOS easily. HP has had a mess in its listing of the IME firmware versus software upgrading in its drivers update site for a long time. Changes of names, versions, where they put the different parts, wrong placement of the SoftPaqs, etc. It is unnecessarily confusing.
PCIe generation 1, 2, 3 issues: In the xw6400 all PCIe slots were Generation 1. In the xw6600 only the two video PCIe x16 slots are PCI Generation 2 (and all other PCIe slots in the xw 6600 are Gen1). There is a HP comparison PDF you can find discussing the differences between the Z600 and the Z620, and that has info on which slots are Generation 3... in the Z620 only. In the Technical and Service manual there also is a block chart that shows the chipset and details the slots regarding this issue. It should be pretty easy to find in the HP Z620 brochures. I doubt you'd see much of a difference from a PCIe gen 2 to a PCIe gen 3 card, all other factors remaining constant. The best bang will come from a "version 2" motherboard transplant into your original Z620 and a nice Ivy Bridge processor upgrade. Agree on the memory.
WIth regard to the Management Engine firmware - as you said it doesn't get updated when doing a bios flash using the standard HP method, however the ME firmware code actually resides in the bios image in the ME region and is thus a componenet of the HP bios file. As such if we take the latest v3.91 bios file from HP and burn it to a flash chip we get both the v8 ME firmware and the 2013 boot block date.
Z620 owners - can you tell me the exact details of the bios chip in the Z620?
With regard to the PCIe 3 speed on the Z620, if you are using an Nvidia card and a Sandy Bridge CPU (v1) make sure that you apply Nvidia's patch to unlock the PCIe 3 speed, since without this it is by default restricted to PCIe 2.
Link to the Nvidia patch: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3135/~/geforce-gen3-support-on-x79-platform