PE 2900 & Intel Xeon E5420

Question

Hello, I just tried to upgrade the CPU on my PE 2900 with 2.5GHz Intel Xeon E5420.

Everyting went just fine, and the bootup screen shows that the CPU is detected correctly by the BIOS (One 2.5MHz Quad-core Processor, Bus Speed 1333 MHz, L2 Cache: 2x6MB).

However, at the end of BIOS bootup (after SAS, RAC etc..) there's a message saying (something like this): "Unsupported CPU combination. System halted!"; in blinking yellow on blue background.

Why is this?

Is there something so different in the 5400 series compared to 5300?

BIOS Revision 2.1.0.
Intel Xeon E5420.

nochkin · Answer

Sounds like you have two different CPUs installed on your PE. Can you confirm?

Dev Mgr · Answer

Dell offers the 5420 in the 2900 III. Is that the model that you have? If not, your system may not support the processor.

More than once have posts on this board shown that Dell bioses have some sort of list of processors that it will work with. This list sometimes gets added on (release notes of a bios will report adding support for newer processors), but you'd want to look at which processors were supported at the time that you bought your server to see which ones should work for sure.

nochkin · Answer

I assumed... But I better make it clear. Dev Mgr triggered that in my mind.
AFAIK, PE2950 III supports E5400, but PE2900 (without III) does not.

Just initial booting up does not always mean that it's compatible (I remember when I used a faster memory on an older system and I got error "Memory is too fast". Unfortunately, Dell wants the exact match).

Message Edited by nochkin on 02-01-2008 11:26 AM

jli23 · Answer

The tech specs for PE 2900 (not the mark III) from here http://support.euro.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2900/multlang/gsgDAO/gsg.pdf says that any "One or two Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processors 5000 Sequence" processor is supported.

So I'd suppose our PE 2900 to work with Dual Core Intel Xeon 5420, which is doesn't.

nochkin · Answer

I believe that these specs were written at the time when 5400 did not exist so saying '5000 family' might not include '5400'.

PowerEdge Hardware General

PE 2900 & Intel Xeon E5420

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