Hey all,
If you had a look on eBay, you will find that there are a lot of Dell T5400s floating around. They often have 45nm Xeon 5200 or 5400-series processors that you might normally expect, but a handful of cheaper ones are equipped and sold with 65nm dual-core Xeon 5100-series processors.
I got one of those systems (dual Xeon 5150 65nm CPUs) some time ago. It runs perfectly fine but my recent lab work has been demanding more CPU threads. Thus I started looking into upgrade options.
I then started to get confused. I see no evidence anywhere that Dell sold or supported Xeon 5100 or 5300-series processors in the Precision T5400! Everything else suggested that these systems officially came with the improved 45nm process (5200 and 5400 series). So I am pretty confident that I can install two E5450 CPUs for example.
Can anyone please confirm what I'm seeing and any success stories? Is the T5400 supposed to be compatible with all four CPU families? Are there any revisions of the T5400 I need to consider or be aware of? As far as I know there was just the one and only T5400 with DDR2. It just happens to support 65nm and 45nm CPUs.
The 'native' 65nm Dell machine seemed to be the Precision 490 which in fact only supported the 5100/5300 series processors, and did not work with the newer 45nm fabrication process. And some older Mac Pros were known to have the same restrictions, evidently.
I have two E5450 processors arriving in the mail soon. I'll post my success/failure story later, but I'd really like to better understand just what is going on out there with the CPU offerings on the T5400. This might have also been more obvious if I could find a proper CPU compatibility matrix for the T5400. No luck though.
Thanks!