Question Trying to upgrade both CPUs on HP Z640

[jabronimus]

Hi all:

I have a older HP workstation, an HP Z640 and I'd like to upgrade the CPU on it but have no idea how to figure out what CPUs would be compatible with the motherboard.

The machine has 2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2620 v3 CPUs in it.

When I run CPU-Z to try to figure out what type of motherboard the computer has, I get the following information under "Motherboard": Hewlett-Packard, Model 212A

When I google the model "212A", I don't find any results that help me.

Under "CPU", I see the following under "Package": Socket 2011 LGA

I have opened up the computer and I know it has a Motherboard "riser" where the second CPU sits.

I'd like to upgrade the CPUs in this computer to something substantially better, and hopefully something overclockable, but have no idea how to figure out what CPUs would be compatible with this system. Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you

 

[kanewolf]

Hi all:

I have a older HP workstation, an HP Z640 and I'd like to upgrade the CPU on it but have no idea how to figure out what CPUs would be compatible with the motherboard.

The machine has 2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2620 v3 CPUs in it.

When I run CPU-Z to try to figure out what type of motherboard the computer has, I get the following information under "Motherboard": Hewlett-Packard, Model 212A

When I google the model "212A", I don't find any results that help me.

Under "CPU", I see the following under "Package": Socket 2011 LGA

I have opened up the computer and I know it has a Motherboard "riser" where the second CPU sits.

I'd like to upgrade the CPUs in this computer to something substantially better, and hopefully something overclockable, but have no idea how to figure out what CPUs would be compatible with this system. Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you

The E5-2667v3 is the best for cores and clock speed.

 

[jabronimus]

The E5-2667v3 is the best for cores and clock speed.

I appreciate the input! eBay has some of these for pretty cheap. Unless others have strong feelings otherwise, I'll buy two of these.

 

[kanewolf]

I appreciate the input! eBay has some of these for pretty cheap. Unless others have strong feelings otherwise, I'll buy two of these.

You never defined what you were trying to accomplish. There are CPUs that have more cores but slower clock speeds. How do you define "substantially better" ???
Do you already have 8 DIMMs installed? Those CPUs are quad channel memory controllers. To maximize performance you need 8 or 16 DIMMs installed.

 

[jabronimus]

You never defined what you were trying to accomplish. There are CPUs that have more cores but slower clock speeds. How do you define "substantially better" ???
Do you already have 8 DIMMs installed? Those CPUs are quad channel memory controllers. To maximize performance you need 8 or 16 DIMMs installed.

Hi there, thanks for the questions.

I do already have 8 DIMMs installed. The motherboard has 4 RAM slots, and the motherboard riser has an additional 4 RAM slots. But whoever made the computer put 8 sticks of 4 GB DDR4 RAM into the machine (maybe that's how it came and no one bothered to upgrade it). So yeah, I'll be upgrading the RAM on this computer also - I've already replaced two of those 4 GB sticks with 16 GB DDR4 sticks instead (so now have 56 GB of RAM).

As for substantially better ... I suppose I just meant something that would have a higher base clock rate and higher thread count than what I've got now, without leaning heavily towards one or the other. I guess what I'm trying to accomplish in the most basic sense is to run multiple programs at once without much slowdown on the computer. I did look through different forums, the wikipedia page on Intel Xeon Haswell-based processors at this page: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors_(Haswell-based) , and tried CPU-Z and other programs to try to understand this and figure it out, but I got a little overloaded with trying to figure out what would even be compatible for the motherboard and motherboard riser.

So yeah, when you answered with "The E5-2667v3 is the best for cores and clock speed", that seems totally reasonable to me, even though when I look at the page I linked to above, I can see that there are CPUs with 10 cores all the way up to 18 cores.

I can see that the E5-2667v3 has 8 cores and a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz, which is clearly better than what I have in my machine now. But, I can also see that there's an E5-2687Wv3 with 10 cores and a clock speed of 3.0 GHz.... and the E5-2692v3, 12 cores and 3 GHz. All of these use the same socket, the LGA 2011-3, so my assumption is they're all compatible with my motherboard - but I don't know if I'm making an incorrect assumption here.

Nor do I know if getting a processor with a few more cores and a slightly lower clock speed is "better" than slightly fewer cores and a slightly higher clock speed.

I appreciate any feedback, information, or references you'd be willing to share with me to help me learn how to understand this better!

Thank you for your time.