HP Z6 G5 A Makes For An Incredibly Powerful AMD Workstation For Creators & Developers

The HP Z6 G5 A review unit as shipped had the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX 96-core processor, 128GB of DDR5 ECC RAM, dual 1TB Samsung NVMe SSDs, and NVIDIA RTX A4000 16GB graphics. By default this unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. However, HP does say that an Ubuntu Linux pre-load is available for this system if you are wanting it pre-loaded. Installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS / Ubuntu 23.10 / Fedora Workstation 39 and other modern Linux distributions all worked fine without any issues. The most likely headache is just with the NVIDIA RTX graphics but Radeon PRO graphics are also available for those preferring a fully open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

No, the HP Z6 G5 A workstation with the 7995WX doesn't clock up to 6.44GHz... That's an AMD P-State Linux driver bug not specific to the HP workstation but other Threadripper 7000 series too. I already reported the issue to AMD and they will be posting Linux driver patches soon for fixing that AMD P-State CPU frequency reporting.

For those curious about the cooling performance, I did run a number of benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with the HP Z6 G5 A while monitoring the peak CPU frequency, CPU power consumption, CPU temperature, GPU temperature, and drive temperatures. Dozens of benchmarks were conducted to stress the system and look for any signs of thermal/power limitations.

After running more than 200 benchmarks in the span of 13 hours, everything was looking good for the HP Z6 G5 A performance with the top-end AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX. The 7995WX had no troubles running at the 5.1GHz peak turbo clock and in fact under Linux was hitting as high as 5.2GHz according to the CPUFreq driver reporting...

On average the 7995WX was pulling around 268 Watts under load.

Under the 13 hours of load, the CPU temperature on average was a warm 74 degrees and did briefly spike as high as 97 degrees, but overall was pushing the limits of air cooling. Under the brief moments of idle and other light workloads the CPU core temperature tended to be in the 40s.

During GPU-bound workloads the NVIDIA RTX A4000 graphics briefly spiked much higher but for the most part the NVIDIA graphics card installed in the HP Z6 G5 A was running in the low to mid 40s.

There were no troubles cooling the PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSDs within the HP Z6 G5 A workstation.

Those wanting to see all the tests run and per-test metrics can do so via this result page.