Ok several months have past and no response from dell. After trying a pair of 933's I bought of ebay, I have confirmed that they do NOT work. I now have a single 866 SL4BV, but after installing it the "Dell" screen comes up but the computer does not go any further.

Anyone have any ideas, I have searched thru the message board but no luck yet in finding anything

 

ken

Still no response from anyone.

I have search the Intel web site and there is only one SL4BV, so from what I have been able to gather, this CPU should work. I wonder if there is some sort of jumper on the MOBO that needs to be changed from a 100 mhz to 133 mhz? I can find one on the actual MOBO, but I will keep searching.

I have upgraded to the latest BIOS and still no luck.

I too have tried posting to these boards

Most time nothing and dell doesnt help much with their support for updating these older machines

I too wish I could find a source of information

Wow, it's been almost a year to date, and finally somebody replied.

Since that last post I have upgraded my server. I installed dual 733's and 1.5 gig of ramm.

I know have 3x250gig drives and 1x160gig boot drive. Still have two slots left...lol

Ken

I have a 2400 and a 2300 that I am wanting to upgrade one of. The 2400 is a 500 mhz the 2300 is a 450 pentium 3

Could you give me anymore info about the exact cpu's you used. I need something so I can try to fish a matched pair off of ebay.

Did you start with a single cpu and upgrade to a dual. If so did you have to remove or reset anything other than just plugging in the cpu.

I think the vrm's are built in on both these so there must be specific cpu's that work. Both my poweredges are single cpu's I would like to put a dual in the 2300 but a better processor.

Did you see performance that was worth this effort. I was worried about the 100 mhz bus speed and if the cpu's would make that much difference.

Doesnt seem like dell wants you to do this they dont offer much info. I think they would rather have you buy a new box

Mike

My machine came with a single 500 (with a card in the second slot). I simply removed both the 500cpu and the dummy card from slot two and inserted the two 733's, rebooted and everything worked.

I got the cpu's from Ebay: Here is the posting (it's gone now but you get the info required from this).

"Matched pair Slot 1 733 MHz CPUs Dell SL3XN P3 733MHZ "

As for performance, I haven't benchmarked it but I think SQL server would run faster as well as other apps. I use my 2400 as a big-fat file server, lots of movies, tv series, pictures, etc. and have never had any performance issues yet running movies from a client-pc.

I am testing my business apps on there now, but that is just starting. Eventually I will be running an SQL version of my companies production system for testing, that's why I upgraded it (at least that's what I told my wife).

I sent you a PM, if there is more info I can give you, send me an email.

Ken

Message Edited by KenLangendock on 04-07-200601:23 PM

I had heard about something that you had to change a power connection or something

I should have two cpu's showing up today from ebay the same as you had spec'ed

Thats the ESM, I downloaded the ESM upgrade patch and followed the instructions.

Not sure what it did though.

The power connectors I changed were relating to the IDE drives instead of the SCSII drives.

Once I removed the backplane, I had to split the power connectors for the IDE hard drives. As for the CPU's, I did nothing except plug them in and boot it up. It recognized the two CPU's all by itself.

I had already upgraded my BIOS in an attempt to get the 866's to work. I think I am running A09 now on the server.

Oh and BTW, I upgraded my brothers 2400 just last year to the same IDE configuration that I am running, he already had dual 733's installed. I pulled them from his and tried them in mine so I was positive they would work.

Message Edited by KenLangendock on 04-12-200612:13 PM

they talk about updating the bios and the EMC not sure what the emc is