Dell Poweredge 2900 CPU upgrade.

Hello David

i want to speed things up a bit and am looking at fitting what i believe to be the highest possible upgrade a pair of x5365's is this the best i can achieve or are there anything else that will work?

The Clovertown quad core CPUs that are compatible with the 2900 are:

X5365
X5355
E5345
E5335
E5320
E5310

You have to have a mark II 2900 for Clovertown CPUs to function. If you have roman numeral II on the front bezel of the system then you should be able to upgrade to Clovertown CPUs. If you have a first revision 2900 that is not mark II then the Clovertown CPUs will not work.

These are quite expensive and in stark contrast two dual core 3ghz 5160's are cheap and i am wondering unless i am running lots of things at once will i need quad core? Its my thoughts that running a single core processor say 3 ghz and say running a spreadsheet on its own and perhaps emails i would see little improvement having a quad or will each application utilise all the processors? thus making everything 8 times faster, do games like Call off duty use multiple processors? i know i cant run them because of the graphics limitations but just wanted to be sure of my thinking.

It all depends on the application. You will need to read up on whether or not the application supports multi core CPUs. If the application is not written to use multiple threads then it will only use one core of the CPU. Later operating systems are better at working with multi-core CPUs, so even if an application isn't designed to use multiple cores the operating system can still offload some of the processes to a different core. This is something that will require research on the application and the operating system you intend on running.

One last thing if i go dual is 3ghz the fastest i can fit or can i go 3.2-3.4 Ghz.

The simple answer is yes, there are dual core Dempsey CPUs that are 3.2 and 3.73GHz compatible with the 2900. The thing you need to understand is that a higher gigahertz processor isn't necessarily faster than a lower GHz CPU. An older generation 4GHz processor may be significantly slower than a newer generation 2GHz CPU because of the technology difference. Woodcrest is a newer CPU than Dempsey. I'm not sure if the technology and bus speed difference between the two would make a 3GHz Woodcrest faster than a 3.73GHz Dempsey since they are very similar in technology. You would need to research benchmarking that has been performed on the two.

The 2900 supports Dempsey, Woodcrest, and Clovertown. Dempsey and Woodcrest are supported across all versions of the 2900. You may have to perform some updates for Woodcrest to function on a first release 2900. Clovertown requires the mark II 2900 to function.

Thanks