drosse1meyer wrote on 2023-05-13, 02:12:

Hello All […]
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Hello All

I have an old PC here that is in its twilight years... an HP corporate SFF with a C2D e6550

Win 10 runs ok but I was curious if a Q9300 would help breath a bit more life into it. They're fairly cheap on eBay.

Thoughts?

More Ram and a SSD would likely speed it up more than a Q9300 would, also does the motherboard in that SFF support the Q9300, its possible itll need a BIOS update to get that support.

You’d be losing a bit of L2 cache per core going to the q9300. It might depend on the workload but my experience with the lga775 processors is L2 cache is king. You might be faster going to an E8600 or one of the quads with 6mb like the q9450 or q9550..

JayAlien wrote on 2023-05-13, 06:17:

You’d be losing a bit of L2 cache per core going to the q9300. It might depend on the workload but my experience with the lga775 processors is L2 cache is king. You might be faster going to an E8600 or one of the quads with 6mb like the q9450 or q9550..

At a guess with the C2D that's in this board it may not support the 45nm C2D CPUs or if it does it'll likely not support the later 45nm models or later 45nm Quads. It would help if we knew what motherboard is in the OPs SFF PC, in my experience the late 45nm CPUs didn't get a lot of support on the older 775 chipsets. (If they did it was generally on the expensive high end motherboards with overkill VRMs)

Don't forget that you'd probably have to change the heatsink as well, which bumps up the cost. It'd have to fit inside the case of the HP too.

astonsmith wrote on 2023-05-13, 09:01:

Don't forget that you'd probably have to change the heatsink as well, which bumps up the cost. It'd have to fit inside the case of the HP too.

At stock clocks you might get away with the stock HP cooler, it wont be amazing and will run a little hotter but it should be fine, I wouldn't do this with a E8600 though but a Q9300 or E8200 would be ok.

What is the model of the machine, you could go with a Xeon E5450 if your motherboards supports it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUqBW-kq1_0 but instead of cutting the notches you can make space for the socket notches on the cpu substrate with a file). Thermal wise, in full load it's between a c2d E8xxx and a c2q q9xxx (tested against a e8400 and a q9505). Also from my experience c2d e6550 runs 'hotter' then a c2d e8400 (at least the ones that i had to compare) so the stock cooling should still work.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-05-13, 03:35:

drosse1meyer wrote on 2023-05-13, 02:12:

Hello All […]
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Hello All

I have an old PC here that is in its twilight years... an HP corporate SFF with a C2D e6550

Win 10 runs ok but I was curious if a Q9300 would help breath a bit more life into it. They're fairly cheap on eBay.

Thoughts?

More Ram and a SSD would likely speed it up more than a Q9300 would, also does the motherboard in that SFF support the Q9300, its possible itll need a BIOS update to get that support.

Yep, I already cloned the spinning rust to a (cheap) sata SSD with Macrium

JayAlien wrote on 2023-05-13, 06:17:

You’d be losing a bit of L2 cache per core going to the q9300. It might depend on the workload but my experience with the lga775 processors is L2 cache is king. You might be faster going to an E8600 or one of the quads with 6mb like the q9450 or q9550..

Hmmm.. but the q9300 has 6 mb cache, 3mb shared between each half.. the older Conroe cpu has 4 MB? i would think that eve nthen, having double the cores would be much more helpful

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-05-13, 07:52:

JayAlien wrote on 2023-05-13, 06:17:

You’d be losing a bit of L2 cache per core going to the q9300. It might depend on the workload but my experience with the lga775 processors is L2 cache is king. You might be faster going to an E8600 or one of the quads with 6mb like the q9450 or q9550..

At a guess with the C2D that's in this board it may not support the 45nm C2D CPUs or if it does it'll likely not support the later 45nm models or later 45nm Quads. It would help if we knew what motherboard is in the OPs SFF PC, in my experience the late 45nm CPUs didn't get a lot of support on the older 775 chipsets. (If they did it was generally on the expensive high end motherboards with overkill VRMs)

The machine's a HP SFF DC5800, with stock board.... Socket support is OK, and the FSB is the same for these two CPU, I'd hope that at the worst it just needs a BIOS update.

Power delivery and cooling may be an issue thanks for the heads up. I dont know about fitting any aftermarket coolers in there, but perhaps I can finagle another case fan. The q300 is a smaller process, but double the cores as the other cpu, the TDP is 30 W higher 🙁

bogdanpaulb wrote on 2023-05-13, 10:55:

What is the model of the machine, you could go with a Xeon E5450 if your motherboards supports it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUqBW-kq1_0 but instead of cutting the notches you can make space for the socket notches on the cpu substrate with a file). Thermal wise, in full load it's between a c2d E8xxx and a c2q q9xxx (tested against a e8400 and a q9505). Also from my experience c2d e6550 runs 'hotter' then a c2d e8400 (at least the ones that i had to compare) so the stock cooling should still work.

interesting ill check this out

Thanks

You could also use Tiny10 instead as it has far less overheads than actual 10

if there is an SSD and enough spare ram (depends on how much the board can take) then the e6550 is pretty good imo, but would suspect the quad might give you a little spare processing capacity, perhaps more noticeable if going online when there can be extra threads happening

i had recent experience of a Q8200 with W10 and it was fine, even with a lowly 4gb ram, noticeably faster than an E4600 i had also used - not the same comparison exactly, but a similar 775 jump

the e6550 is pretty good though

anyway, back on topic - quad sounds fine if ssd and ram are ok 😀

gerry wrote on 2023-05-13, 20:06:

if there is an SSD and enough spare ram (depends on how much the board can take) then the e6550 is pretty good imo, but would su […]
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if there is an SSD and enough spare ram (depends on how much the board can take) then the e6550 is pretty good imo, but would suspect the quad might give you a little spare processing capacity, perhaps more noticeable if going online when there can be extra threads happening

i had recent experience of a Q8200 with W10 and it was fine, even with a lowly 4gb ram, noticeably faster than an E4600 i had also used - not the same comparison exactly, but a similar 775 jump

the e6550 is pretty good though

anyway, back on topic - quad sounds fine if ssd and ram are ok 😀

👍

About 6 months ago, I modified a Dell G45M03 microATX board to run a Socket 771 Xeon X5470. They have been rather cheap as well. That is fast enough to almost feel like a modern PC. I actually bought the CPU years ago but had problems getting it to work properly. But I got another freebie motherboard and went back at it and figured it out this time.

I suppose it's unlikely there would be any readily available mods for a HP corporate board BIOS though and doing it yourself is a complicated time investment.

Really though, aside from the fun in playing with something, it's not worth spending more than a few $ on this hardware. Much faster, much newer hardware is cheap as well. Like Skylake-based corp hardware for example.

Xeon E5450 has a TDP of 80w https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/p … 33-mhz-fsb.html while Xeon X5470 has a TDP of 120w https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/produ … ifications.html . They both have 4 cores and 12mb cache and run at the same FSB but due to the fact that the E5450 is 'colder' makes it more appealing in this case. I run it with a small OC (FSB400-Bus speed 1600-3.6ghz) with a stock quad core lga775 intel cooler with no issues.

Regarding compatibility issues, if the motherboard posts with the cpu and boots/runs fine with it, there should be no need for a bios update/mod but you can get some annoying message at post about 'unlocking the full power of your cpu'.

bogdanpaulb wrote on 2023-05-14, 04:12:

Xeon E5450 has a TDP of 80w https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/p … 33-mhz-fsb.html while Xeon X5470 has a TDP of 120w https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/produ … ifications.html . They both have 4 cores and 12mb cache and run at the same FSB but due to the fact that the E5450 is 'colder' makes it more appealing in this case. I run it with a small OC (FSB400-Bus speed 1600-3.6ghz) with a stock quad core lga775 intel cooler with no issues.

Regarding compatibility issues, if the motherboard posts with the cpu and boots/runs fine with it, there should be no need for a bios update/mod but you can get some annoying message at post about 'unlocking the full power of your cpu'.

The chipset is Q33 and native CPU support listed here: https://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-Intel_(c ... press.html

Reviewing this, I may go for the Q9450 since that has 12 mb cache.

It looks like people have tried modifying the BIOS to add support for xeons but that seems a bit too much of a pain on these corporate boards. In addition to modifying sockets.

Honestly I'm trying to keep cost down for this. The PC's in my parents basement and isn't used much, but nice to have at times, otherwise they mainly use laptops. It was running 32bit Win7 but after cloning to SSD, I figured it would be best to upgrade to Win10 at least for security and compatibility sake.

The other more substantial upgrade i was considering is finding the cheapest corporate system that has an 8th gen+ Intel (for Win11 support). Last I checked those seem to be going for about 100-150 on ebay.

I run a Q9550 on one board (95W TDP) but I use a Zerotherm cooler because the intel ones suck.

That probably wouldn't fit since it's SFF case 😅.

If theat is a concern, OP could go with something like a Q9550S, those are just 65W officially so the stock cooler for the also 65W E6550 should be fine.
IF the board supports the CPU.

swaaye wrote on 2023-05-14, 03:43:

Really though, aside from the fun in playing with something, it's not worth spending more than a few $ on this hardware. Much faster, much newer hardware is cheap as well. Like Skylake-based corp hardware for example.

I agree; many Haswell prebuilts are getting retired and thus getting thrown out at dirt cheap prices. An i5-4570 will absolutely smash up the Core 2 Quad while also having newer standards like SATA 3. Even if not buying a full prebuilt, the boards from them are dirt cheap (HP Prodesk 400 G1 boards are like $12 and the CPU is maybe $15.)

brian105 wrote on 2023-05-15, 07:35:

swaaye wrote on 2023-05-14, 03:43:

Really though, aside from the fun in playing with something, it's not worth spending more than a few $ on this hardware. Much faster, much newer hardware is cheap as well. Like Skylake-based corp hardware for example.

I agree; many Haswell prebuilts are getting retired and thus getting thrown out at dirt cheap prices. An i5-4570 will absolutely smash up the Core 2 Quad while also having newer standards like SATA 3. Even if not buying a full prebuilt, the boards from them are dirt cheap (HP Prodesk 400 G1 boards are like $12 and the CPU is maybe $15.)

Do you have a link to one of these?

Just go look around the fleabay.