Design and Features
The Z420 resides in a full-size tower with utilitarian looks. It's very close in design to HP's high-end client PCs, but with a few embellishments like the Z420 logo and an easy to grab handle built into the optical drive bay. It has lots of room for internal expansion.
The Z420 is eminently expandable, with space for two more optical drives, one additional hard drive, another PCIe x16 graphics card, two PCIe x8 cards (one PCIe gen2, one PCIe gen3), one PCIe x4 card, and an old-school PCI card slot for good measure. There are four memory DIMM slots free (the system can handle up to 64GB), and seven SATA ports to support more drives than can fit in the chassis. It's a lot of space, fitting for a mainstream workstation PC. There's a 600W power supply to run it all. The case lid, card slots, optical drive bays, and the sleds for the hard drives are all tool-less. You won't need a screwdriver to install most upgrades. On the whole the system is easy to upgrade and service.