5punk

It's my brothers birthday in April and he wants his PC upgraded and since I'm responsible for everything PC related I need to do some research. He has an AM2 motherboard with a single core AMD Athlon 3500+ in it, ideally I'd like to stick in an X2 6000+ but HP's engrish speaking support say "that the maximum upgrade for the processor is 5000+.Till 5000+ processor only HP has been tested on your motherboard which was sucessful." The specs for the motherboard can be found here.

I know buying a core 2 and a new motherboard would be faster but looking at benchmarks the 6000+ is pretty close to the E6750 and it'll be cheaper and alot less hassle to just get a 6000+. Problem is that HP can't confirm if the 6000+ will work or not as they've only tested up to 5000+ but its basically the same as the 5000+ but clocked higher, do you think a 6000+ would work in that mobo? If it doesn't how easy would it be to return a used but incompatible processor to say ebuyer?

Then there's the power supply, he wants to get a new graphics card eventually aswell so he'll need the PSU upgraded. Looking at the motherboard it seems to use standard ATX connectors so I was thinking about getting this PSU, but again HP and their engrish support have said "regarding the power supply that you want to upgrade in your PC is maximum 300 watts only and if you upgrade more than 300 there would be problem in your PC." From what I know though there is no maximum wattage compatible with a motherboard so he's just talking rubbish right?

I just spent the last few hours researching this further and it seems there's people who're using x2 6400+s in that mobo with the only problem being that windows xp doesnt pick up the model name. I've emailed a couple of them to see what they have to say about it.

I've also seen some one using a 500w PSU with that mobo so that most likely confirms that they're talking rubbish.

I'd be surprised if it didn't work, the chipset certainly can support a 6000+, but I know that OEMs like HP like to fuck people over with their restrictive BIOS's.

I went from a single core 3500+ to an X2 5000+ and it's a decent speed boost. If it's cheap enough I'd say just play it safe and do that.

I found this program which gives bios related information. It says that the max cpu speed supported is 3.7ghz but I'm not sure how reliable it is.

Got a reply from one of the people I emailed and he said he's getting the CPU tommorow and will let me know how it goes. I may end up just going down the safer route as you say though.

I saw an article in the news forum about the 6000+ slowly killing some MSI motherboard due to excessive heat and power consumption so I think I'm probably going to steer clear of it after all.

I discovered that there's energy efficient and cooler running 65nm versions so I'll probably get the fastest 65nm one available which appears to be the 5400+.

Is that definitely compatible with your brothers mobo? The new size may not work on older am2 boards.

HereComesPete wrote:Is that definitely compatible with your brothers mobo? The new size may not work on older am2 boards.

I emailed them and they said the 65nm versions are compatible but obivously still said the max speed they'd tested was 5000+. As far as I know faster speeds should work though.

Ok, so I just put in an x2 5400+. All I'm getting is a post beep, it beeps waits a second then beeps again repeatedly. The fan spins up and everything, it just won't boot. Any ideas?

Problem solved, needed a bios update which didn't work last time I tried but did this time, and thanks to berk for his suggestions