Question Overclocking 771 Xeon with BSEL mod

[imrazor]

Someone recently gave me an old Dell T5400 workstation. It has a Xeon E5450 @ 3.0 Ghz. As is to be expected from a processor this old, performance is a bit underwhelming. I was hoping to try the BSEL mod on it to attempt an overclock, but it's a bit hard to find info OC'ing a socket 771 Xeon. There's plenty of info about transplanting it to a 775 motherboard, but I was specifically looking for info on which pins to cover to force it to 1600Mhz FSB on a socket 771 mobo.

Anyone have any info on this OC'ing this old CPU?

 

[Lutfij]

I wouldn't do anything on that prebuilt machine. In fact I'd see if I could repurpose the system as a file server or a NAS or even better to give it to someone who'd benefit from a machine as opposed to trying to overclock on a prebuilt machine that wasn't designed to be overclocked. FYI, you should also factor in the age of the PSU and the heat that'll be dumped when you overclock since they can and will lead to issues, issues you can easily avoid.

 

[imrazor]

Wanted to post a bit of an update here. I did get SetFSB to overclock successfully. I managed to get my 3.0 GHz Xeon up to 3.6 GHz but it wasn't entirely stable. 3.55GHz was better, but I'm not convinced that it's 100% stable.

I face a peculiar problem with my RAM. In order to overclock, I can't run the memory at full speed. The RAM slots are rated for 667MHz, but if I try to run my DIMMs at that speed the OC fails at pretty low speed. And because it's a Dell, I can't just hop in the BIOS and change the ratio. Instead, I have to load in 2x533MHz DIMMs to lower the base speed of the memory bus. The problem with the 533MHz DIMMs is that they don't have heat spreaders, and run really hot. Like 90C unless I ramp up the fans to jet speed.

I thought I could use SetFSB to change the FSB to RAM ratio, but I can't figure out how to change the ratio so I can just use 'normal' 667MHz DIMMs. Anybody remember how to use SetFSB to change the memory ratio, or is that even possible?