Proliant 1600 - Maximum Upgrade potential

[Mike Percival_1]

Right. From personal experimentation, these beasts will happily run PIII-850MHz processors. Don't use Compaq original parts, but instead use IBM processors. These have a different heatsink which is slightly wider and have more fins and hence more surface area for cooling. By using the IBM versions, you will NOT need any kind of thermal upgrade kit.

I am now running my 1600 with a pair of IBM P-III 850 MHz CPU's (S-Spec SL43F) which I picked up on ebay for £5.00 (US$9) and they are correctly identified and speed tested using SiSoft Sandra. They run cooler than the two Compaq P-II 450MHz processors I had originally thanks to having nearly three square inches more surface area on the heatsinks. I also tried a pair of ex-Dell Poweredge P-III 750 CPUs (with 80mm fans on each heatsink) and these worked just fine with a few mods to the fan wiring.

The system seems to run fine and benchmarks ok with Tualatin core Celeron processors fitted to a Powerleap Socket370-Slot1 Adaptor but performance is not so good even at 1.3GHz because of the limitations of the Celeron.

For my money, a couple of IBM P-III 850's is best bet.

[Mark J. Easly]

Mike,

That's very interesting. Can you provide any detail to your configuration, including IBM part numbers, BIOS, DIP switch settings, I/O board used, etc...

Thanks,

Mark

[McKaamos]

Mike, Could you please tell me how you got those 850's working?
I have a couple of P3-700's here, but the system keeps telling me it has discovered unsupported CPU's.
Even with the latest firmware it keeps doing that. I've already got a couple of upgrade VRM's, so that won't be the issue.
Do I need special jumpersettings?

[cabledealer]

I've tried a P3-650mhz CPU with markings on the cpu -- 650/256/100/1.65v S1 . It failed.
It didnt worked on this proliant 1600 server with someguy's pin settings (mike daryl).. perhaps im missing something...

Core/Bus Ratio
SW1 SW2
1 2 3 4 1 2
66/266 Off On On Off Off Off
66/300 Off Off On Off Off Off
66/333 Off On Off Off Off Off
100/350 On On Off Off Off Off
100/400 On Off On On Off Off
100/450 On Off On Off Off Off
100/500 On Off Off On Off Off
100/550 On Off Off Off Off Off
100/600 Off On On On Off Off
100/650 Off On On Off Off Off

this is what i've found on the net. Anyone got further undocumented settings ?

Oh, DID ANYONE TRUELY made it possible to work with CPU higher then 600mhz ??

Thanks,.

[Sami Osterlund]

Hi Mike,

How did you manage to get over the "unsupported processor detected, system halted" phase. I tried every jumper setting I could figure out, but weren't successful with PIII 733 nor with Tualatin 1.2GHz. I would really appreciate the information since I'm about to order new processors for my 1600. I had the the latest system bios downloadable from HP.

Thanks & Regards,