overclocking w3520 using HP z400 is it possible ?

[oldnick]

hi 

 

few months back i got hp z400 Mobo with xeon w3520 for a very good price 

 

the mobo appear to be locked but is it possible to unlock it using custom bios or something ?

 

anybody have i lead to where to start from or where to search and ask 

 

thanks

[MoonlightSylv]

It's very unlikely that you could OC it without buying a new motherboard, and from a bit of searching it seems that there are no custom BIOS versions.

[Waqas409]

Its not possible to overclock on locked motherboard. but i'd say get a W3690 processor, im pretty much sure it will fit in your socket ( x58 ).

It has 6 cores / 12 threads. what else you need.
Check aliexpress or local market for that processor

[Clarion99]

Hi w3690 is unlocked and can be overclocked via XTU. I get just over 4GHz stable. You are not able to change voltage or anything else then multipliers. Also need good cooling, I use Corsair H55 liquid cooler.

[Ground]

If you can overclock using the multiplier (see post above this one) I would highly advise the much cheaper and also unlock w3680 over the w3690 if you were to change it.

[Clarion99]

Gound - price difference is about 30EUR as of October 2017 (w3680 vs w3690).

 

[Cortmarshal]

There are two versions of the HP Z400 motherboard. The first revision was a much smaller production run, but only had 4 DIMM slots. The 6 DIMM slots is a much more robust and reliable board. Make sure you update the BIOS as the latest HP BIOS for these 7 year old workstations, 3.60 Rev.A was released just Apr 14, 2016. It requires burning a CD to update.

 

The W3680 is the chip you want for LGA 1366, it's multiplier unlocked, cheap, and supported on the second revision board. There's NO overclocking at all to be had in the BIOS, just make sure enhanced turbo boost is enabled, and enhanced memory performance.

 

HOWEVER, software overclocking with the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility(and probably others) allows you to set the multiplier per core usage. i.e., if only 1 core is being used you should be able to get a  stable multiplier of 32x with good power supply on the HP board, which is a clock speed of 4.34 GHz I believe. The stock cooler in the HP Z400, supplied by Cooler Master, is quite good if you change the fan, though the proprietary 5 pin connector might require some plastic snipping to get a 4 pin fan hooked up to the top 4 pins. It'll probably then give you a low power cpu cooler error at boot unless you ground the first and last pins together somehow, just press F1. A minor inconvenience for the reduction in noise/ increase in cooling.