What do I need to upgrade dual core with quads core CPUs in a HP DL585 G2

[Imptech]

Hello

I have quad Opteron 8216 DL585G2 and want to upgrade to 83xx (8354 or 8378) or any compatible quad core Opterons.

Are the 23xx series compatible?

VRM Upgrade?

Anyone with experience have any caveats?

[Mark Woodruff]

See http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12575_na/12575_na.PDF for all the part numbers.

The 448193-B21 kit should work. The VRMs are the same. Make sure you upgrade the BIOS to the latest version (A07 I think) first.

Be prepared to be disappointed, however. Unless you're running something that scales extremely well to 16 cores, you won't see the performance benefits you're hoping for. In our testing, the 8222SE processors are consistently faster than the 2356 (the two way version of the 8356). They don't have as many cores, and they use a lot more power, but they're faster on a core for core basis.

How much memory do you have? If you're using more than 8 slots per processor, the speed drops, which slows things down. There are a lot of tradeoffs involved. You may be better off upgrading memory if it's not full, or switching to dual ranked DIMMs and populating half the slots. Also depends on the OS. 2003 x32 works better with the memory banks interleaved. The x64 version supports NUMA, and works better with them NOT interleaved.

Lots of things to consider. Look at your apps first to see what's holding them back first. If it's memory, I'd suggest going that route before upgrading the processors.