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

[Leo P]

They are compatible within generations.  My X58 motherboard that now has an
I7 950 will work perfectly fine with the Xeon X5850 in it because they are
both LGA 1366.  While the Xeons cost hundreds of dollars when they were
current, they are now extremely cheap on the used market - $25.  What would
be gained is two additional cores, four additional threads, and a much more
overclockable chip that runs cooler.  I do not want to go to a more recent
generation yet because the LGA 1366 is currently perfectly adequate for my
needs and the system has 12 GB of fast memory in it.  This site was a good
place to compare CPUs and motherboards to see which ones were compatible:
http://www.pc-specs.com/pc-custom-builder/cpu

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 5:50 PM, Fred Brockman <fbrock at att.net> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
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