HP xw6400/8400 bios support for E54xx Xeon's (Penryn) - NOT!
JGL
systems. Every other motherboard/system house has done so by now
including DELL. They all use the same Intel 5000X chipset so there is
no technical barrier. Is this a sign of a inept company or just
marketing trying to get us to upgrade to newer hardware. What BS.
Cydrome Leader
just buy a dell next time.
hpnucklehead
Has anyone found a way around this limitation? I want to
upgrade my xw6400 beyond a 2.33 ghz xeon quad setup! I'll pay
someone if they know how to do it safely. Thanks!
Benjamin Gawert
[XEON 5400 in xw6400/8400]
> Has anyone found a way around this limitation?
No, and there is none. The BIOS has no support for XEON 5200 and 5400
series and the board hardware also doesn't support these processors,
period. That's why the xw6600 and xw8600 exist!
> I want to
> upgrade my xw6400 beyond a 2.33 ghz xeon quad setup! I'll pay
> someone if they know how to do it safely.
And what's exactly the problem? xw6400 and xw8400 support all XEON 5300
series quadcores including the XEON 5365 3Ghz variant.
But instead of upgrading I'd consider waiting a while as the next
generation of workstations (xw6800/8800?) using the new Nehalem XEONs
should come out in the first half of 2009 and provide a much better
performance increase than any upgrade. So it might be better to just
keep your xw6400/8400 a little longer and later sell it and move on to
the new workstation generation.
Benjamin
hpnucklehead
Can you really upgrade to 5365? I was told that the
xw6400 did not support any quad xeons beyond the 2.33ghz chips.
Benjamin Gawert
> Can you really upgrade to 5365?
Yes, you can. But be aware that the Xeons up to and including the 5345
(2.33GHz) have 80W TDP while the X5355 and X5365 have 120W TDP. Putting
two X5365 in the xw6400 means the internal cooling has to deal with more
heat which means the fans spin faster and the whole machine gets more
noisy. Also, if your xw6400 is filled up with fast and powerhungry 15k
SAS hard drives and a powerhungry gfx card like the Quadro FX 4600 that
the internal cooling runs on the upper limit if the computer is used in
a warmer than normal environment.
And of course putting in an unsupported processor voids your warranty.
Having systems with X5345 and X5365 I can tell you that you really need
very CPU-intense applications to notice a real performance increase
between X5345 and X5365. Especially when considering the price tag for
the 5365. IMHO upgrading is a waste of money.
Do you have dual cpus or just a single cpu config? If the latter, you
might end up better by getting a second X5345.
Ben
hpnucklehead
i've got two quad's, and I'm video editing with Adobe
Premiere. If I could cut down my rendering time by 30% it would be
worth the upgrade...but I'm not keen on voiding the warranty. So,
just to be clear, have you actually seen the upgrade to 5365 work?
Thanks for your help!
Benjamin Gawert
> i've got two quad's, and I'm video editing with Adobe
> Premiere. If I could cut down my rendering time by 30% it would be
> worth the upgrade
The 5365 has a 28% higher clock rate which means that everything
clock-rate dependent would be 28% faster. Sadly, this is only valid for
a small part of operations, and as other factors (i.e. memory
performance) stays the same I'd expect more around 20-22% of increase.
Not much for depending on the source $1300-2000 per X5365.
> ...but I'm not keen on voiding the warranty. So,
> just to be clear, have you actually seen the upgrade to 5365 work?
Yes, I upgraded three xw6400 with X5365, but these originally had two
slow dual core processors so the performance bump was quite huge which
won't be the case for your system as you already have quite fast
quadcore CPUs.
If rendering is an issue I recommend to sell your xw6400 and get a
better system. The Xeon 5400 series is faster than the 5300 series, it
has a faster FSB and memory, too, and buying an xw6600 or 8600 with
faster CPUs is probably much more worth the money than upgrading your
xw6400.
Benjamin
darthweb
I have installed two x5365's but it says processor power
requirements too high and stalls ....
Any suggestions?
Many thanks
darthweb
I've tried to install two x5365's in an XW6400 but it boots and says
that they require to much power and halts the system.
Is there anyway around this?
Thanks
darthweb
I've installed latest 2.35 BIOS BTW