Failure to boot after CPU upgrade

[jpouls]

I recently tried to upgrade my CPUs on my z800 to two Intel Xeon w3690 chips. Upon pressing the start button on my computer I hear the regular two beeps and my power button is green. Get some green flashing lights from my DVD drive. Then the fans start going full blast for over 5 minutes (unusually long, despite the regularly long boot time due to me having 96gb of ram installed) with no video signal. I eventually turned it off, as I was worried something might be seriously wrong. Any ideas as to what to do aside from reinstalling old CPUs over again?

[SDH · Accepted solution]

HP officially supports adding a second identical processor to the one that is currently present, assuming the first can accept a second.  There is quite a bit of knowledge in this forum which you can target using its search bar (upper left), which searches this forum only.  Here's some topics for you to research:

1.  Do you have a version 1 or a version 2 Z800?  Have you checked your boot block date?  Do you understand that the version 1 Z800 has limitations that the v2 does not in terms of what processor(s) it can run?

2.  Do you understand the differences between the W3690 and the X5690?  Do you know which of these has only a single QPI link, and which has two?  Do you know that you must have 2 QPI links for a processor to work with a second processor and a motherboard simultaneously?

3.  Do you know that there are motherboard firmware detectors that can tell what power level your processor uses and can tell whether you have a heatsink/fan appropriate for your processor's needs?

4.  Finally there is the HP microcode issue.... in BIOS there is generally a "white list" of approved HP processors that have been tested to work with specific workstations and a processor not on that list may not run even if it "should".  And, there are exceptions..... but two W3690 will not work on your Z800 I'm sorry to say.

If you have the version 2 Z800, two "Performance" heatsinks/fans, and two X5690 processors then you should be good to go.  The X5690 processor is on the HP approved list for the later v2 Z800, in the later QuickSpecs, and each of those processors has 2 QPI links.   It gets a bit complicated!

p.s.  The Z800 may accept two Performance heatsinks/fans from the Z400, which are easy to find on eBay and inexpensive but no forum member I know of has done that experiment.  I tried that with the Z600 and it was pretty much a failure because that case is significantly thinner than the Z800's case and the case opening handle mechanism projected down enough into the case to interfere with the case door closing fully.  Get the type with the metal back bottom airflow deflector which you can bend a bit of needed to avoid tall capacitors on the motherboard if needed.  The official HP Performance heatsink/fan for the Z600/Z800 is rare and expensive.

[jpouls]

Thank you so much for your post. I hate to be that guy who doesn't know how to work the search (I did try, but laymen terms don't always produce results specific enough and computing isn't my main specialty), but I sincerely appreciate your input. This has given me a lot to go on my future research.