Xeon E5420 as drop-in replacement for Xeon 5150 in Mac Pro?

dfhgfdk

April 5, 2010 3:29:51 PM

Hi there.

I've searched for an answer to this question but the info I find is always incredibly technical and daunting and impossible for my tiny brain to digest.

The question is: Could I drop a pair of Intel Xeon 4-core E5420's into a Mac Pro that was originally supplied with 2 x Intel Xeon 2-core 5150's? (and expect it to work, obviously).

The former is 4-core / 2.5GHz / 12M / 1333, the latter is 2-core / 2.66GHz / 4M / 1333, and they are both socket 771, but I don't know enough to know if that's enough.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance offered.

Dan

More about : xeon e5420 drop replacement xeon 5150 mac pro

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saaiello

CPUs Master

April 5, 2010 4:37:36 PM

I have found many articles on this and most have went with the X53xx series and E53xx series so a 53xx xeon will work without a doubt I have not been able to find anything about the 54xx series working. The E53xx will be a nice upgrade it is a quad core like the 5420 except it only has 8MB of cache instead of 12. The X5300 series would be good too except they only have 2x 4MB of cache instead of 8mb shared the X5365 looks like would be the best its a 3.0 ghz Quad core.

http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/action.lasso?-search

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/cpucards.html

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dfhgfdk

April 5, 2010 9:08:57 PM

saaiello said:

I have found many articles on this and most have went with the X53xx series and E53xx series so a 53xx xeon will work without a doubt I have not been able to find anything about the 54xx series working. The E53xx will be a nice upgrade it is a quad core like the 5420 except it only has 8MB of cache instead of 12. The X5300 series would be good too except they only have 2x 4MB of cache instead of 8mb shared the X5365 looks like would be the best its a 3.0 ghz Quad core.

http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/action.lasso?-search

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/cpucards.html

Hi, thanks for your response.

After lots more research I have discovered this thread in which useful chappy says "Basically 5100 and 5300 series chips are compatible, and 5200 and 5400 are compatible as far as chipsets go. That's the easy way to remember it. The old Mac Pro (1,1 and 2,1) versions were based on 5100 and 5300 CPU's. The newest Mac Pro which already has quad core chips (3,1 I believe) are based on the 5400 chips."

In summary:

51xx and 53xx are inter-changeable, and
52xx and 54xx are inter-changeable.

As my Mac is 1,1, which is 51xx, I had better set my sights on the 53xx series.

I am now looking into this famous BSEL mod you can do to up the performance of the lower spec chips.

Cheers
Dan

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