LGA775 - Possibly the worlds Easiest Overclockable CPUs!

When it comes to LGA775, the first thing you're going to tell yourself is "OMG THIS IS OLD". And you're right. However in terms of life, overclockability and when talking about leaps in technological advancements, the C2D, C2Q and the C2E CPU lines were HUGE! Remember when you bought that first tower with a dead end P4 and you COULD UPGRADE TO A DUAL CORE CPU! the possibilities were endless! In 2018, LGA775 may not be as viable as it was 10 years ago, but it still has life in it.

Server Grade Xeons on the LGA771 socket are essentially the same as a LGA775 CPU, however they do require a bit of physical modification. (DETAILS WILL BE ADDED LATER*) like cutting the little notches on the sides of the LGA775 CPU Socket on the board. Which could prove to be slightly dangerous due to the risk of socket damage.

Now what if I told you that you can bring a bit of life to your old LGA771/5 system and continue to use it? are you interested?

Breathing some new life in your system ranges from buying an LA775 modded 771 xeon, OR using a BSEL mod.

Buying the Modded 771 chip

Scouring ebay, with a bit of browsing you can find X3300, X3400, or, if you're lucky and your board supports it, a X5400 series chip. Please note, you'll need adequate cooling. Another thing to keep in mind is that these Xeons are only quad cores. They range anywhere from the Q6600 to the QX9775 in terms of equivalency. Meaning that if you have your eyesight on a lovely QX9775, which for some reason still holds an amazing value of 300 some dollars (CAD) on ebay, you might not want to spend that much money. But for purely enthusiastic purposes, you can always get the equivalent Xeon X5482 or even the X5492 for just a fraction of that price! Update your bios, plug that sucker in your board and enjoy the extra life in your retro (lol) rig!

BSEL Mod, Tape Mod or whatever you wanna call it!

There's nothing wrong in not wanting to invest more than 200? at most dollars in a retro rig, and that can include NOT Spending a metric ton of your hard worked money onto a chip that's way beyond done. Luckily for you, there's an easy way to buy a low end chip (for example Q6600) and give it an overclock without actually overclocking it. Did I lose you yet? Keep reading!

Tape mod is the most practiced because it simply works. I have a Q6600 in an HP Elite 8000, it's an LGA775 system that runs DDR3 Ram, and since it was running a bit slow on it's 1066 FSB, I decided to give it a bit of a boost by covering a pin and getting a bit of an extra boost out of it.

By taping over the first pin under the notch OPPOSITE of the golden triangle, you're forcing your CPU to work on a slightly higher frequency. I won't go into the details behind how it works, or why, just take my word for it for now. I've tried this on a few systems: done on an E4500, E8400, E8600, Q6600, Q9650, QX9650 and they've all gone from 1066/1333 respectively to 1333/1600. which is a pretty significant boost averaging to 500-600 Mhz.

So, There you have it. Before you throw your Old lga775 system away, understand that you could probably get a few more years life out of it, give it to your child so they can play games on it, take advantage of the locked bios bypass overclock, donate a system to someone in need, experiment with it. Go crazy with the reasoning behind WHY, just be curious and have fun with this.

Thank you for taking your time to read this.



EDIT!: This is not a definitive way to Overclock a locked down board or to get some free performance out of your chip. There are BSEL0, BSEL1 and BSEL2 grades and I will write more about the subject when I have more information and better understand it. The higher the BSEL grade, the higher frequency you can run at. Allegedly an E2140 can outwork a QX6800. I need samples.