771 to 775 mod

Ive got one machine running for about 4 months now with the tape mod...no problems so far

eBay is loaded with the stickers if anyone needs them..just search 771/775
 
I guess the question for me now is... "What do I do with it?" :p

The board only supports 4GB across two DIMM slots, and it's nothing fancy in and of itself. I suppose I could replace my file server's guts (runs on a sempron 145) but then the Xeon could be a little more power hungry.

What to do... what to do...?
 
Hmmm....interesting. Gotta figure out if it's worth it in cost for one of my older systems.
 
Hmmm....interesting. Gotta figure out if it's worth it in cost for one of my older systems.

depends on how much you wind up paying for the Xeon I suppose. I had a pair of E5335's layin' around from a retired server. Most people seem to shooting for Q9650 equivalent-type stuff like E5640's.

For me it was worth the inflated $8 I paid for one little sticker just for the giggles since I already had all the other stuff.
 
too bad this wasn't figured out YEARS ago! This is a very interesting mod! Will for sure increase the value of some xeons on ebay.
 
Tried it on my Gigabyte 965p-DS3 v1. No workie. Need a version 3.x. Oh well, got a Q6600 from eBay for $30 after shipping as well, and that one worked... Rocking at 3GHz...;)
 
I did it. I can take my E5450 all the way to the FSB limit of my MSI P35 Platinum. It seems most boards that support 45nm quads will work whit the 54xx Xeons except for X38 and X48 for some reason. I was about to build a Haswelll rig but with this I'll hold off another year or more. These are some pretty good CPUs when clocked over 4ghz. Now I need to get a GPU..
 
Last edited:
At the expense of sounding stupid what exactly does that pin "sticker" do that makes them work in an LGA 775 motherboard?
 
At the expense of sounding stupid what exactly does that pin "sticker" do that makes them work in an LGA 775 motherboard?

There's two parts to the equation. You have to shave off the socket guides in the 775 socket because the 771 CPU will be inserted into the 775 socket positioned 90 degrees from its typical orientation in a 771 socket. The sticker literally just swaps the two affected pins :D

Blocks the contacts that are not needed.

Nope, those lands on the CPU are definitely necessary, if they weren't you could pull this off with a simple tape mask instead of needing the little custom sticker.
 
At the expense of sounding stupid what exactly does that pin "sticker" do that makes them work in an LGA 775 motherboard?

It flips two pins with each other.There are holes so the other pins still make contact. 771 is keyed on the other sides so the keys on the socket have to be cut off with a razor. You have to be sure to put CPUs it in the right way without them.
 
Last edited:
Nice job! I love seeing hardware being modified to get around manufacturer limitations. I guess you could always use it as an HTPC or make it a file server to run a Plex stream. I have never done it since all my HTPCs are fast enough to decode HD on their own.
 
At 4.2ghz a Herpertown is faster than a i5 4430. At 4.0 it still faster than i3 especially in multithreaded stuff. These Xeons overclock quite well and their performance scales very well with clockspeed. The real drawback is the outdated platform. I'll just upgrade what I can carry over to my next rig. I already got a new PSU, now I need a GPU and a bigger SSD. It'll hold me off until 14nm and DDR4 or longer. Maybe this rig will last me 10 years.
 
I'm in on this! Picked up a sticker and L5410 for $29 shipped. Should be able to sell my E8400 for around $20 after the swap :cool:

Been wanting to upgrade to a quad core for a while, but didn't want to invest a lot of money in my old platform. Running a P5K Deluxe with 6gb and E8400, 7850, 750 watt PSU, SSD, couple of drives, etc. Basically a good system with an aging board and processor.
 
I ordered another E5450 SLBBM for my Wife's Biostar G41 DVI. It will overclock it a little bit. My first one was $40, this one was $50. Still worth it.

Here it is at 4.2 in Pass Mark compared to non-K Haswells

pm42.jpg~original


At 4.2 is about equal to a 4440 Haswell i5 in all the benchmarks I've ran.
 
Last edited:
$29 for the CPU and sticker and I'm up and running. I killed a fucking P5K Deluxe by accidentally putting it in the wrong way, but I had another board and I'm up and running on that:

h5JGqVV.png


Motherboard is a Gigabyte P35-DS3L running bios F9 (no modifications).
 
Couldn't overclock much; locked mult @ 7x and the mobo doesn't seem to like 400fsb, so I stopped at 366.

Still, for $29 with everything included, it's a nice upgrade from 2 core to 4 core and a lot more cache (while using significantly less power).

ElHVxN2.png
 
The ability of these Xeons to overclock so well just makes me depressed. The E5-2687W and it's big brother, the E5-2697V2 run so cool at default, it's maddening to imagine what these chips would be capable of running at if they were unlocked. They clearly have an incredible amount of headroom and they'd be absolute monsters if they were able to be pushed. So much performance wasted...it's enought to make an enthusiast cry....:(
 
Part of me really wants to try this, but I doubt I will. It reminds me of the good times I had bridge modding Athlon XPs a little over 10 years ago. I had a dual Athon XP 2500+ machine for a while... a little bridge modding got them running at 2GHz and made them dual capable.

The only spot where I might like an upgrade is swapping out the old laptop I'm using as an HTPC of sorts, but I wouldn't want to use the Core2 board I have for that since it's a full sized ATX board. It's also already got a quad core on it. Still tempting though.
 
So much performance wasted...it's enought to make an enthusiast cry....:(

I would argue the discovery of this modification should make any enthusiast smile ear to ear at the prospect of scoring such a cheap and easy way to crank out performance from an older socket. :D
 
I would argue the discovery of this modification should make any enthusiast smile ear to ear at the prospect of scoring such a cheap and easy way to crank out performance from an older socket. :D

I never did buy a Socket 775 motherboard (I had two Socket 771 systems) and most enthusiasts have long since moved on by this time. If this was back in the day, for sure, but now it's more of a historical oddity than of any practical value. Most modern CPUs wipe the floor with anything from that era, even a simple Socket 1366 [email protected] will. This trick is a nice boost to owners who still have the parts kicking around, but one would have to have a good reason to build such a system from scratch. That said, these chips come from an era where one could still play with a system and tweak it to it's maximum potential, without needing the official unlocked versions. Today, those freedoms are a distant memory and enjoying those freedoms again may be a large part of the appeal.

This little trick just underscores to me how truly beautiful chips the Xeons are (with their bountiful headroom) and what a crying shame it is that the recent ones are multiplier and bus locked. The Xeon E5-2600 would be capable of great heights if they were unlocked and seeing such great chips never being able to achieve those heights is what makes me very sad indeed.
 
I never did buy a Socket 775 motherboard (I had two Socket 771 systems) and most enthusiasts have long since moved on by this time. If this was back in the day, for sure, but now it's more of a historical oddity than of any practical value. Most modern CPUs wipe the floor with anything from that era, even a simple Socket 1366 [email protected] will.
But how do you get a Socket 1366 motherboard and CPU for free? :D

Some of us have systems that get Passmark scores of just 1500, so $25 for a boost to 4000 is a big deal.
 
This totally has me interested in what I might be able to do with my two gigabyte ep45-ud3p boards I have
 
have a P5B deluxe rotting on a shelf somewhere lol. Interesting. What is the highest multiplier xeon 771 that would work for this??? Then again, if it doesn't work on my P5b deluxe, not worth it to me. anyone know if the P5B deluxe would work???
 
have a P5B deluxe rotting on a shelf somewhere lol. Interesting. What is the highest multiplier xeon 771 that would work for this??? Then again, if it doesn't work on my P5b deluxe, not worth it to me. anyone know if the P5B deluxe would work???

Some folks in this thread over on OC.net mention that board, but only in reference to clock rate issues. Compatibility unclear I guess.
 
Thread Necro: I got a *Xeon E5335 working in an Abit FP-IN9 SLI motherboard. I suppose the efficacy of this configuration vs the E6550 that was in it may be arguable for some stuff but the Xeon sure does handle encoding a helluva lot faster than the C2D did!

Correction: A Xeon E5335 Not an "X5335"
 
Last edited:
So cool to see you guys getting the cheap xeon upgrades as well and i bet they handle there tasks just fine:D Very interesting thread
 
Well, this is neat. I have an Asus P5Q Deluxe board that I'm not doing much with. The Q6600 in it runs at 3.4ghz. I wonder if this mod could get me a little more mileage out of an old build?
 
Well, this is neat. I have an Asus P5Q Deluxe board that I'm not doing much with. The Q6600 in it runs at 3.4ghz. I wonder if this mod could get me a little more mileage out of an old build?

If you do, just make sure you have steady hands when you go to slice the socket guides out in order to fit the 771 module! I though I was going to destroy my FP-IN9 twice by slipping off the plastic with my x-acto blade. I bent a pin on both sides of the damn socket but was able to very carefully bend them both back into alignment. It's very harrowing to use sharp objects with non-trivial force near the socket's pins :eek:
 
I just did this mod to update my main system. I decided I didn't want to risk damaging my precious motherboard by modding the socket. I took a fine round needle file (Harbor Freight purchase!) and carefully made new notches in the 771 CPU to align with tabs in the 775 socket. I used a 775 CPU held up to the new 771 CPU to figure out where the notches go, then carefully filed the CPU with the oval shaped file until it fit nicely in the socket. I installed my mod sticker, installed CPU and fan, and system booted up right away. I added the Xeon microcode to my F6 BIOS to get speedstep, virtualization, and SSE4.1 support working. The Xeon L5410 I chose was 10 bucks, and is a low power (50 watt Harpertown). I'm running it at a modest 2.8GHz (400FSB x 7) with only 1.125 volts. System has been ran through Prime95 for 16hours with no crashes and 55 degree temps using a cheap aluminum heatsink/fan (screw on style from a Dell Inspiron 530). What a difference from my old E8600 dual core! Anyways, for anyone doing this mod....don't be afraid to carefully mod the CPU itself and save your motherboard from possible damage if a mishap occurs while modding the socket! Cheers!!!

Sorry my pics aren't a bit better....that's all my 1998 Olympus digital camera can do! :D







 
Oh shit that's pretty clever Polara, modding the CPU instead.

Sort of tempted to try this out on an aging system now....
 
I just did this mod to update my main system. I decided I didn't want to risk damaging my precious motherboard by modding the socket. I took a fine round needle file (Harbor Freight purchase!) and carefully made new notches in the 771 CPU to align with tabs in the 775 socket.

I must say the thought of modding the CPU package itself never even entered my mind. Nice work!

I have another 771 Xeon sitting in a CPU receptacle in a drawer that I've been eyeballing lately. If I get another compatible 775 board, I'll have to seriously think about doing this the next time. It looks to be a bit more time consuming, but yea, slicing that close to the pins in the 775 socket freaks me out and I've almost ruined pins twice.
 
Just wanted to report in - My HP Voodoo Blackbird 002 (Nvidia 750i SLI Chipset) works happily with the X5460 and the little taped-on land mod.

Nvidia boards seem to work the best, when it comes to pin modding Intel chips.
 
Has anyone tried this with Dempsey's yet? I have some woodcrests and clovertowns but I bet the dempsey's can really clock.
 
Oh goodness, so glad I ran across this thread! Going to give a try on my Asus P5Q pro and a X5460!
 
I just picked up an E5450 and paired it on an old LGA 775 system to replace my busted Athlon II X4 635. The board I have doesn't allow an OC higher than 3.3GHz (PCIe speed is linked to the FSB) so I may track down another board.
 
Last edited:
Oh goodness, so glad I ran across this thread! Going to give a try on my Asus P5Q pro and a X5460!

Anyone doing this Mod... did you all update your bios? When updating Bios did you do them sequentially or just flashed to the newest Bios? Any Microcodes for Bios required...?

Just as HAF72, I intend on doing it on a Asus P5Q pro and a X5460.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top