Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Motherboard P5LP-LE in HP and Compaq

In past I was big supporter of HP products, especially computer systems. But in last year I lost my trust in their products. Firstly, my home workstation from HP started to malfunction. It was high class product - i7 920 with 1TB HDD and 8 GBs of RAM. It was really nice computer which offered a lot of bang for a buck. Unfortunatelly I write in a past tense - one day I started to get BSODs in Win7. After some further research I found that is known problem with i7 processors. A lot of users managed to solve such errors with settings of voltage for processor. But HPs motherboard did not have such options in BIOS. Also, it was just little bit out of warranty, so no luck for me. To make story short - I threw that junk into a dumpster and got myself proper components and built my machine from scratch. And I intend to do that in afuture, becouse of things like that.
Anyway, back to newest findings, that some other might benefit. P5LP-LE motherboard. I know it is old machine, but at work I have Compaq machine that has this MOBO built into. Lately I was working on some processor intensive software and I got green light to upgrade computer as much as possible. Surely, I quickly found web page with listed specifications for this M/B.
Processor upgrade information state:
Core 2 Duo E6x00
Core 2 Duo E4x00
Pentium D 9x0 Dual Core
Pentium D 8xx Dual Core
Pentium 4 6x1 series
Celeron D 3xx series

So, I simply checked on-line stores and surely quickly found http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifE6700 processor.
I was thrilled, since it is 3.2 GHz processor vs current E4300 1.8 GHz processor. I was eagerly waiting delivery of CPU and as soon as time ermited I built new CPU in a machine. I connected all together and ... NOTHING. Black screen, vents were spinning, thats all. Ok, I figured I should update BIOS to get support for a new CPU. After searching I found my Compaq computer on HP support page. After I choose my OS (Win XP) I did not get any BIOS upgrade to download. I remembered that computer came with preset vista OS, so I choose this one, and sure enough there was BIOS update available. I downloaded exe file and use RAR to extract its content to a folder. There was *.ROM file that is actual BIOS code and program Winflash. With Winflash I simply updated BIOS from my WinXP OS, which is not supported?
Anyway, everything went smoothly and I again built my new CPU in a machine. But still, computer was not working.
So, back to research and internet forums...
And, conclusion is - Intel made two E6700s processors. The one, that would function with P5LP-LE M/B has 4MB cach, 2,66 GHz and was introduced in 2006. It was made in 65nm technology and has code name Conroe. The one I got was introduced in 2008, is made in 45nm and has code name Wolfdale.
So, if only HP would state on its support site, that processor must be Conroe, or if Intel would employ person to think of new model names...
Well, I would not loose my precious time over nothing and you would not read this...

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