Intel Xeon E7-4800/800 V3/V4 CPUs in servers/motherboards made for V2 CPUs

[sth-n00b]

Because I am looking for a new (secondhand) home-play-fun server, I hope somebody can answer this question.

Do the HP Proliant DL580 G8 or the Dell Poweredge R920 function with Xeon E7-48xx/88xx V3/V4 CPUs?

The socket is the same.
Sockets Supported by Intel® Xeon® Processors

And DDR3 ram is supported.
Table 1. Feature Comparison of the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800/4800 v3 product family to the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-4800 v2 product family

But the documentation says only V2 is supported.
HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen8 QuickSpecs
Dell PowerEdge R920 System Owner's Manual - Technical Specifications

I came to this question because in this thread it is stated the Supermicro X10QBI motherboard does work with E7-48xxV2/3/4 and E7-88xxV2/3/4 CPUs. So I thought the same might be true for other motherboards.

 

[vintagehardware]

Lenovo states in there documents that when you upgrade their E7 systems (x3950/x3850) from V2/V3 to V4, you can keep using DDR3 memory. They seem to be only one that have official support of this. But I haven't heard people here or elsewhere mention that.
For HP the mainboards are the same (same part number) but the bios resides in SPI boards which are different for G8/G9. And I doubt their firmware permits running ddr3 with E7 v3/v4 cpu. I would be happy to help test this if someone loan me some G8 memory boards with ddr3 (I have a G9) but I highly doubt it.
I think HP has the best design and gpu support etc. But their paywall for updates is a big negative and their machine is generally closed for tinkering compared with SM. Same reason many people here avoid their stuffs.

 

[zir_blazer]

LGA 2011-2 was a bit special since you had Processors without an IVR (Integrated Voltage Regulator), Ivy Bridge-EX v2, and those with it, Haswell-EX v3 and Broadwell-EX v4. On consumer market and HEDT, the IVR was the justification to come up with new Sockets for Haswell/Haswell-E (LGA 1150 and LGA 2011-3) compared to the previous Sandy/Ivy Bridge normal and -E ones (LGA 1155 and LGA 2011-1). This is something that surprised me when I discovered that the same enterprise Socket lasted THREE Xeon E7 generations.
Supposedly, LGA 2011-2 Motherboards could be designed in such a way that you could either use the Motherboard VRM or configure it to bypass it, giving it full support for all v2/v3/v4 Processor generations. I'm not sure whenever all v2 generation Motherboards were designed in such a way so that they can be upgradeable to v3/v4. I do remember that there were v3/v4 only Motherboards, though.

 

[sth-n00b]

Thanks both for your reactions. I did some more desk research and as far as I could found these are the servers supporting E7-48xx V2.

• Fujitsu Primergy RX4770 M1
• IBM System x3850 X6 (or x3950 for eight sockets)
• SuperMicro SuperServer 4048B-TRFT (X10QBI motherboard)
• HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen8
• Dell PowerEdge R920

The IBM and SuperMicro do support V3/V4 (officially or not), HPE probably not, Fujitsu and Dell is yet unknown.

Looking at the prices for these servers or serverparts, it seems SuperMicro is much cheaper than the other ones. So if I want to buy/build a four socket E7 48xx V2 machine (full disclaimer, that would be my first time build so I might need some help ), it looks like the X10QBI is the way to go. Like I said in another thread, the whole thing cannot be too noisy so customization is needed for sure. And I am open to other ideas of course.

 

[vintagehardware]

Most supermicro boards allow ipmi raw commands to control fan speeds. There is a thread in the guide section on this topic: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/supermicro-x9-x10-x11-fan-speed-control.10059/
Basically fan headers are divided into CPU/IO zones. And you can issue commands to control fan speeds in each zone individually. It's an open question whether X10QBI's fan headers can be controlled in this way. Maybe someone with a supermicro system can issue a command to see if lowers the fan speed. An example one is:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipmi ip address> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x45 0x01 0x01
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipmi ip address> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x70 0x66 0x01 0x00 0x16

The first line enters the manual fan control mode. And the second line orders the cpu zone fans to rotate at 25% of full RPM.

Four socket systems are designed as high availability systems (sometimes called RAS, see Patrick's articles on these systems) . So X10QBI may be different from other SM boards.

 

[otspadmin]

r thread, the whole thing cannot be too noisy so customizatio

Most supermicro boards allow ipmi raw commands to control fan speeds. There is a thread in the guide section on this topic: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/supermicro-x9-x10-x11-fan-speed-control.10059/
Basically fan headers are divided into CPU/IO zones. And you can issue commands to control fan speeds in each zone individually. It's an open question whether X10QBI's fan headers can be controlled in this way. Maybe someone with a supermicro system can issue a command to see if lowers the fan speed. An example one is:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipmi ip address> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x45 0x01 0x01
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipmi ip address> -U <username> -P <password> raw 0x30 0x70 0x66 0x01 0x00 0x16

The first line enters the manual fan control mode. And the second line orders the cpu zone fans to rotate at 25% of full RPM.

Four socket systems are designed as high availability systems (sometimes called RAS, see Patrick's articles on these systems) . So X10QBI may be different from other SM boards.

So interestingly enough I have a X10QBI and I have tried those commands as that is what is posted everywhere on the forums. However while the first command DOES work (setting to full speed fan mode) the second command (with any threshold percent) does NOT work. There also seems to be little to no information on getting this mobo fan speeds down, like you said it was designed for power/cooling efficiency so I might be out of luck