Hello there,
I recently got an used Dell R920 which supports v2 Xeon CPU and I wonder if it is possible to flash a custom BIOS in order to alos support the v3 CPUs. It has the same Intel chipset and socket as the Dell R930 which supports officialy the v3 CPUs.
Any help about it, is appreciated!
Hello,
Any news about it? Can someone give me a direction on how to start looking on it? eg It also depends on the Intel ME version? If yes, how can I get this info (eg what is the current version). I tried with the hwinfo64 but i cannot find any Intel ME section under motherboard.
Unlikely that what you’re asking is a simple BIOS modding procedure. LGA 2011-2 has the notorious distinction of supporting both Ivy Bridge-EX and Haswell-EX on the same platform. The major difference between them is that Haswell has the famous IVR (Integrated Voltage Regulator), whereas Ivy Bridge does not. In consumer platforms, this was enough for Intel to justify a different, incompatible Socket, but for the Xeon E7 series it just reused the same platform, and you could even use the same Motherboards for both Processors. However, when used with a Haswell-EX, the Motherboard VRMs were bypassed or something so that the IVRs did the bulk of the job instead. If I recall correctly, several Supermicro Motherboards required new PCB Revisions for Haswell-EX to work in them, so it may not be something that just requires some modding, plus you have real chances of killing the Processors.
First of all thank you for the answer and for the detailed info.
Just for the try, do you think that just inserting the microcode eg from v3 CPU in the BIOS of R920 would the new CPU recognized by the server? Or should I also change something else? (eg ME version or something else). I am just trying to understand the procedure in similar ‘situations’.