Lately I’ve noticed interesting way to upgrade my old box with LGA775 system. It has Core2Duo E7300 processor and 8GB of RAM.
So I saw somewhere on the web that one can use Xeon processors (771 socket) in 775 socket motherboard, just by applying little patch on it to swap a pair of pins. Sweet.
So, I managed to order one Xeon E5450 from aliexpress.com. It’s about $40 free shipping. After two weeks I have it in my hands.
My chip came already patched and all I had to do is to cut little plastic ledges or keys in the socket. Because 775 and 771 have key cuts on different sides.
One should cut that ledges very gently to not bend surrounding tiny contacts.
After cooler installed with thermal grease, computer was started right away.
Motherboard in that box is Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 with modded v.F4 firmware from overclockers site. This is not necessary, just addition of microcodes for Xeon CPUs for virtualisation and such.
My CPU now runs at 3.6GHz (3.0GHz nominal), will see how it goes.
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