18 December 2017

Upgrading Pentium G2020 to Xeon E3 1265L

Today I received a used Xeon E3 1265L from China via ebay for $85. My motherboard is AsRock B75M-GL and originally host Pentium G2020 (was about the same price at that time). This Xeon is lower in wattage(45 vs 60) and has more cores (4+HT vs 2). Sandy/Ivy motherboard was Intel's last generation to properly support XP (my USB3 ports automatically turn to USB2), so I'm grateful to have this processor upgrade. Not just for XP but also for other classic 32bit compatible OSes (OSX 10.6.8, RHEL6, DragonFly BSD 3.2.8 or Solaris 10)

There is an incident during installation, I accidentally scratches the LGA pins and two pins get bent (gulp), When I first boot it, the BIOS tweets 4 times and I was like "Damn I'm done for it!". I spent a lot of time to massage the bent pins using smallest screwdriver that I have with other hand holding flashlight and I hardly break a sweat (cool). Once both looked upward again, the second boot get the system properly detected, temperature is at ~38C so I guess that's good enough for used item.

Now for the first time :


So this configuration: Server CPU  + desktop motherboard is a good deal afterall. I understand why used ECC DIMM is super cheap since it's has big compatibility issues, but this cheap Xeon is no-brainer.

BTW the delivery is one and half week late than the max. estimated date.

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