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AMD Istanbul Field Upgrade

ZDNet Jason Perlow field upgrades his 2P Opteron Quad core system to Opteron Six-core using AMD's lastest Istanbul server processor.
By Jason Perlow, Senior Contributing Writer
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AMD was nice enough to send me two Opteron 2435 "Istanbul" 6-core processors to upgrade my Supermicro dual-processor system, which was previously using Opteron quad cores.

Read more about the AMD Istanbul at ZDNet Tech Broiler.

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The back of the Istanbul is standard Socket F. No major changes from the previous four generations of Opteron chips.

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Another look at the Opteron 2435.

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My SuperMicro server.

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Inside my dual-processor SuperMicro.

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Exposing CPU socket 1, with the original Quad-core chip.

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Original Quad Core chip next two the twin Istanbuls. Boy, Its gonna be nice having 12 cores.

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CPU #1 firmly in place.

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Here's were stuff went wrong, which I have to take complete responsibility for. Somehow I managed to bend the socket pins on CPU socket #2. While Socket F processors are fairly easy to install and replace, you do need to be careful how you pull them out and drop them back in.

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Even though I damaged the second CPU slot, I still was able to boot with the first CPU and boot into Windows Server 2008 R2.

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Six processor cores detected by Windows 2008 R2's Device Manager. Yeah, I'd love to have 12, but that will have to wait another week until I get a new mainboard from SuperMicro.

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