Z600

[Adrianis]

Hi,

I have a Z600 with a REVISION 1.0 motherboard, 2xCPU E5620 2.4 GHz which I would like to upgrade to an 2xX5675 LGA1366 6 cores CPU's.  Does anybody know if this is possible?

Adrian

[SDH]

Read this thread  HERE .

There are issues to know about related to the version of your workstation and to the demands of the motherboard for cooling:

1.  That X5675 is a processor for a v2 Z600.  Here is a quote from the link above:  "Processors..... X5675 versus X5672. The first is the fastest official version 2 hexacore. The second is the fastest official version 2 quad core. Clock speed of the second is faster than the significantly more expensive first. I have one of each here, both with two processors."

With more of the OS and programs available that are multithreaded you may want the two hexacores over the faster clock speed two quad cores.  Search eBay for SLBYL and there was only one sSpec code for that.  They have come down in price quite a bit.  Some processors had two releases or even three, and you always want the latest if you're buying now.

2.  Heat..... both those are 95W max TDP, which the stock cheap easy to find heatsink/fans you already own can cool.  If you go for a hotter processor it has to be approved by HP (there might be some exceptions to this), but it also will demand a "Performance" rather than a "Mainstream" heatsink/fan combo.  Those Performance ones for the Z600 are virtually impossible to find and expensive.  There is a ground jumper hack that makes the motherboard believe it has a Performance heatsink when it actually only has a Mainstream one, but you'll not run into that issue with the X5675 (see section 3 below if you really want to run that).

3.  Motherboard transplant.  Buy a used Z600 v2 motherboard off eBay and open up your options to what you want.  I can help you with picking the right one if you need help on that.  Those are about $45.00 including shipping from good US sellers these days.  It is not a huge project, and is a necessary upgrade for you in my mind.  See item 5 below.  Huge cost savings there.

4.  In the past I added a HP USB3 card (the "2x2" version with the Texas Instruments chipset used also on the motherboard of the ZX20 family) to all our Z400 and Z600 builds... that still works great, and is supported automatically under W10.  This can be a worthwhile project and I've posted a detailed thread here on that here previously... pics with a HowTo.  If you don't really  use USB for significant transfers it is not a worthwhile upgrade, however.

5.  You can run better faster memory with the Z600 v2 motherboard... and I've got some tips on that too.... you can use specific retired HP server memory that cannot run on the v1 Z600 motherboards.  There is a fair amount of this memory on the market these days because HP DDR3 ECC registered RAM servers have been retired for upgrading to DDR4 versions.