[conspire] CPU upgrade questions (was sous vide question.)

[Fred Brockman]

> > On Oct 27, 2017, at 12:49 AM, Leo P <yaconsult at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And while my stew is cooking, I am researching and debating how 
> worthwhile it would be to replace the Intel I7 950 4 core CPU in my 
> aged X58 LGA 1366 motherboard with a Xeon X5650 or similar 8 core 
> CPU.  The Xeons are available used on eBay for as little as $17 
> with $25 being a very common price and are reported to be very 
> overclockable with youtube videos in abundance and my "enthusiast" 
> ASRock motherboard has all the necessary BIOS tweaks available.
> >
> > Has anyone tried a similar CPU upgrade from consumer to server 
> chip?  It might be a cheap, fun little experiment to try 
> considering the low cost and minimal disassembly.  The current 
> configuration runs fine but this would give it another couple of 
> cores for virtualization and the Xeons are reported to be much more 
> overclockable and run quite a bit cooler.  In comparison, the 
> high-end consumer version is the i7 980x with six cores start at 
> about $160 used - six times the cost of the X5660.

I'm wondering how much latitude there is in swapping microprocessors 
on a given motherboard (here for Intel products). Obviously the chip 
has to match the socket so Pentium 4 to i7 exchanges are out.  Can 
i3, i5 and i7 CPUs of a specific generation be interchanged (assuming 
here that they take the same socket)?

What about going from one generation to the next?

Is it safe to assume if the chip and motherboard are compatible at a 
hardware level then upgrade success depends on how much upgrade 
flexibility the manufacturer has designed into the BIOS?

I assume going from desktop (i3-i5-i7, now i9) to server (Xeon) is a 
bit much to expect from a motherboard unless the chips mentioned 
above are basically the same silicon and package.