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PowerEdge R900 motherboard upgrading CPU's
I have an R900 with a C764H motherboard and four XEON E7330 CPU's.
These CPU's are not supported by VMWare ESXi 6.5 however the XEON E74xx series is.
1) the 7330 is a quad-core, 2.4GHz, 2x3MB L2 Cache. the 7440 is also a quad-core, 2.4Ghz, 2.3MB L2 cache. i assume i could simply drop in 7440's without any problem. is this correct?
2) the E7450 is a 6-core, 2.4GHz, 3x3MB L3 cache CPU. can i drop these in, or do i also need to change the motherboard to one that works with 6-core CPU's?
3) if the answer to #2 is a yes (that i do not need to change motherboards), could i use X7460 which is the same as the E7450, but with a faster clock (2.66GHz instead of 2.4GHz)? or do i need a different motherboard that supports the faster clock speed?
THanks
DELL-Josh Cr
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July 10th, 2017 10:00
Hi,
Both the 7450 and 7460 are validated CPUs. You should not need to replace the system board for the newer CPUs, just BIOS 1.1.9 or newer.
lsimltd
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July 17th, 2017 13:00
Hi, I did as you suggested. Downloaded Update ISO and updated everything. Now my BIOS version is 1.2. However it does not work. Fans are rotating, no error on display. But no output from video and keyboard. I have checked with only only one CPU. No success. While returning to former CPU everything works. What else can we do? Thanks.
DELL-Josh Cr
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July 17th, 2017 15:00
All of the other sockets have no processors when you put the one new one in? Are you putting it in socket one? Which is the rightmost socket when looking at the front of the server.
lsimltd
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July 18th, 2017 00:00
Yes, I do as you say. The only CPU is in 1st socket as shown on cover (the rightmost when looking at the front).
DELL-Josh Cr
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July 18th, 2017 10:00
How is the memory configured? Can you try to put all the new processors in and see if it works?
lsimltd
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July 18th, 2017 12:00
You know everything is connected properly. After posting here I haven't turned on servers till today. Today I wanted to test all CPUs by one and guess what, from first time server is up, even with all other CPUs. I do not know what magic happened, but really I did nothing new, just turned on. Just a silly question, can it be server needs some time for synchronization?
DELL-Josh Cr
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July 18th, 2017 13:00
Glad you got it working. There shouldn’t be anything with time synchronization that would prevent it from completing post.
beekerc
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July 28th, 2017 17:00
Hi Josh,
just installed four x7460's. server booted just fine and ESXi 6.5 installed without a hitch.
thanks for your help
swcrazy1
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February 8th, 2019 13:00
Waking up an old thread...have a R900 that is only seeing 1 CPU. Have 2 different sets of 4 CPUS to test any of the 8 cpus alone boot the machine without issue. bios is 1.2. BMC was lost on last firmware update. Don't know how to recover BMC if its not recognized by the system at all just a connection failure message no versioning on boot for BMC. why will the CPUs not show on boot but all work alone so its not a CPU issue?
swcrazy1
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February 8th, 2019 14:00
phanguy
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January 16th, 2020 12:00
Just for the sake of record keeping: I completed the same upgrade to my PowerEdge R900 with the x7460 CPU without any major issues. ESXi 6.5 installs without any problems, but version 6.7 appears to have dropped support for that CPU.