AMD Istanbul Field Upgrade
The back of the Istanbul is standard Socket F. No major changes from the previous four generations of Opteron chips.
Another look at the Opteron 2435.
My SuperMicro server.
Inside my dual-processor SuperMicro.
Exposing CPU socket 1, with the original Quad-core chip.
Original Quad Core chip next two the twin Istanbuls. Boy, Its gonna be nice having 12 cores.
CPU #1 firmly in place.
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.
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.
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.