cheap skulltrail set up on ebay/ also lga771-775 conversion

[prawny1]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Skulltrail-D5400XS-Motherboard-with-2x-QX9775-Extreme-3-2-GHz-CPUs-/121269500063?pt=UK_Computing_LaptopMotherboards_CPUs_CA&hash=item1c3c39b89f

I came across that bundle whilst looking into available lga771 cpu's for a lga771-775 conversion.

It turns out that the lga771 (xeon) is almost identical to the lga775 (core2) with just two pins reversed and the notches on the edges of the cpu orientated differently, it is otherwise electrically compatible.

Using this stick on adaptor
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Adapter-LGA771-Xeon-to-LGA775-MOD-Q9650-Q9550S-Q9450-Q9400-Q9300-Q8400-Q8300-/400641787055?pt=CPUs&hash=item5d481c84af

and removing the two plastic tabs on the socket itself, you can fit lga771 cpu's into almost any lga775 motherboard (x38+48 chipsets from asus evidently don't work), many later revision motherboard apparently have the correct microcode information in their bios and will identify the xeon chips just like any other new cpu you might fit.

Some boards however need that microcode adding to the bios manually using editing programs and reflashing the bios.

I am hoping the board I am using is the former as it has phoenix secure core bios and I have no way of editing them as of yet.

I have just bought a xeon e5450 slbbm, 3ghz 80w quad core 45nm e0 stepping cpu and an adaptor sticker to test,

the cpu was just £28 posted the nearest lga775 cpu is the q9650 95w chips but they fetch nearer £150.

If It works I can retire my trusty e8400, if it doesn't I might just buy a proper dual cpu board and a second e5450 for an 8 core set up and a stupid amount of ram.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Seb]

That'll be a beast for non time critical workloads such as video encoding, just keep in mind that Skulltrail was a bit of an abortion before it even began as far as gaming goes. Having an L2 cache that's split 4 ways is very bad indeed.
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2010 Triumph 1050 Sprint ST

[prawny1]

Even at that price I would struggle to justify spending that much on pc stuff,

The chipset having the memory controller has been an issue for intel cpu's for years but I see your point having what is basically four dual core cpu's running through one chipset is going to cause traffic issues especially when a program is waiting for info from a different thread on the other physical cpu basically leaving the other cores idle intill it catches up.

I have done the lga771 conversion on my sff pc now though,

I am now running a xeon e5450 3ghz quad core instead of an e8400 the equivalent core 2 quad still demands £150+ on ebay, other than updating the microcode the conversion is a doddle.

The motherboard I am using came from a fujitsu esprimo e3521 pc so no overclocking and the chipset limits me to ddr3 1066, the bios updates from fujitsu are in a different format to most bios so I would not have been able to add the relevant microcode myself.

Fortunately though fujitsu have a tool available to add missing microcode to (supposedly) all their motherboards, you just boot the floppy/usb with the unknown cpu installed and the utility writes the matching microcode to the bios without having to do a full bios reflash.

I should now be able to use all e0 stepping harpertown xeons as they share the same cpu-id.

Using the same heatsink my temps under intel burntest are identical to the e8400 even though I have two more cores making heat, what I have noticed though is my idle temps are much much lower,

The e8400 would sit at 32.c indicated but I do suspect the diode just won't register less, the coolest core on the e5450 reads just 16.c.
____________________
hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.