Question Will an i5-4590 work in a Lenovo Thinkcentre E73 10AS ?

[LygarJ]

Hi everyone, I've recently got my hands on a Lenovo ThinkCentre E73 10AS Desktop PC (I looked up the product ID on Lenovo website). the pc is working as I checked that it powers on and boots up. I also have an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF which stopped working, it doesn't boot up and the CPU fan just spins on max speed, I've tried unplugging everything except the power supply and CPU and it does the same thing, so it might be a motherboard issue if I'm not mistaken. My question is: can I take the CPU and HDD from the HP and put it on the Lenovo, if so what are things I should be careful about and will it boot up and start up?

Any and all help would be really appreciated as I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to PCs. thank you in advance for your help

 

[DSzymborski]

That Lenovo model lists as coming with the initial Haswell CPUs, and as far as I can tell, didn't come with the later refreshed Haswell "Devil's Canyon" CPUs that came a year later. This important because those CPUs required BIOS updates. If the BIOS for this motherboard was not updated or, even worse, if Lenovo never even provided a BIOS with the updated microcode, those CPUs wouldn't work. The problem is that prebuilts are almost invariably poorly documented and supported; if you just wanted to take a couple parts from the HP, you'd have been far better off just getting an aftermarket motherboard.

Don't count on just slapping in the HDD from the HP and expected it to boot off it (if that's the plan). Dumping an OS from one PC into another is a pretty poor practice and even if it initially works, there's a good chance you'll be chasing bugs or mysterious performance problems for months.

 

[LygarJ]

That Lenovo model lists as coming with the initial Haswell CPUs, and as far as I can tell, didn't come with the later refreshed Haswell "Devil's Canyon" CPUs that came a year later. This important because those CPUs required BIOS updates. If the BIOS for this motherboard was not updated or, even worse, if Lenovo never even provided a BIOS with the updated microcode, those CPUs wouldn't work. The problem is that prebuilts are almost invariably poorly documented and supported; if you just wanted to take a couple parts from the HP, you'd have been far better off just getting an aftermarket motherboard.

Don't count on just slapping in the HDD from the HP and expected it to boot off it (if that's the plan). Dumping an OS from one PC into another is a pretty poor practice and even if it initially works, there's a good chance you'll be chasing bugs or mysterious performance problems for months.

Thank you DSzymborski for your reply, I was planning on getting an aftermarket motherboard but unfortunately, they cost an arm and a leg from where I'm from lol. With regards to the bios, I see that on the Lenovo website they have flash bios updates up to 2020, will I be able to update the bios to where I can use the CPU and if so how to I go about doing so?

As for the HDD, what would be the best way forward with is?

 

[DSzymborski]

Thank you DSzymborski for your reply, I was planning on getting an aftermarket motherboard but unfortunately, they cost an arm and a leg from where I'm from lol. With regards to the bios, I see that on the Lenovo website they have flash bios updates up to 2020, will I be able to update the bios to where I can use the CPU and if so how to I go about doing so?

As for the HDD, what would be the best way forward with is?

Depends if they actually updated the microcode. Again, this stuff is generally very poorly documented in prebuilts.

If you're using the HDD in a new PC, this outlines the best practice.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

Hopefully, important data on the HDD is already backed up multiple places.