Upgrading the Dell Precision T5500 CPUs (with a big oof)

In this video I upgrade the dual Xeon processors in my Dell Precision T5500 from Xeon E5620 processors to Xeon X5650 processors, bringing the total core count from 8 cores 16 threads to 12 cores 24 threads. Though it wasn't without its minor casualty, which I was luckily able to fix within this video, so it wasn't all doom and gloom in the end, thankfully.

[@RetroTechTom]

It would be a monster rig back in it's time with those dual Xeons in it

[@danydepp8487]

Hey man thank you!!!! if it wasnt for your video i would never realized that you can have 12 threads!!!!! Here's the story short: I have an old t5500 with a Xeon x5680 that was laying around and recently purchased an nvidia 1060 6gb card so i decided to put it on the t5500. Installed windows and played games very good but the cpu was only showing 6 threads. Today i saw your video and was corius that you can have 12 threads with that CPU... So i went to the windows task manager and found that virtualization technology was dissabled (bios missconfigured)... Went to bios settings, enabled hyper threading and virtualization and boom!!!! now i have 12 threads!!! Im so happy now XD. I love you!!!.

[@hoangtubehoangtube]

Did you get cpu hot ?

[@mez90b]

Ive had the single cpu version of this for 10 years and its still working pretty well. Just upgraded to 48gb ram and 4gb gpu so im back to photo editing much easier than i was previously. Its a beast of a machine considering how old it is.

[@ChanOrSxarr]

I just got one for 50$ no hard drive I need one of those and I wanted to swap the case is that possible?

[@mez90b]

@@ChanOrSxarr unlikely the dell case is very specific, the motherboard positioning is very non standard. The way the power supply fits is very non standard and shape too. The fan ports on the mb are non standard non standard wire colours. The machine is great but you can't change much about it.

[@mez90b]

​@@ChanOrSxarrDid you get the single CPU or with the riser for both CPU? Either way my previous comment stands, no just clean and use as is.

[@scottgetz8233]

just ordered the parts to do this. Thanks for sharing!

[@nickfletcher1586]

Thanks for showing how to do this! Gonna see if I can do the same!

[@jpegjake]

This takes me about 15 years when i was in a dorm with my friends playing with computers

[@Adam130694]

There are much better (copper with heatpipes) coolers for 1st CPU (that one on actual motherboard, not riser) + fans. Might be handy with those 100W monsters. Also, best bang for buck IMO are x5675's. Those 400MHz can be worth those 5-10 bucks more. Also those X series Xeons supports DDR3-ECC up to 1333MHz, not great of a upgrade from 1066, but still. Anyways, great old piece of hardware, pair it with RX580 and have behemot of render/gaming PC.

[@jwoolery99]

It would be a monster had I not gotten my Ryzen 7 2700x computer lol. Still great for what it is though. I use it at the moment with a Radeon R9 380.

[@JayBuccola]

Got an rx 580 on a single core, and it renders well. Side note, paid $180 last year for the gpu, currently going for $600.

[@JayTavarez]

i know this comment and the video is old, but i can confirm that with my Dual-X5670son my t5500 i am able to use 72GB of 1600MHZ DDR3-ECC

[@eagleeyei03]

should i go for x5620(16gb ram) from i5 2400(8gb ram)? with gtx 1050

[@jeffmitchell1003]

I had dual X5650s in my T5500. Upgraded them to X5670s. Do you know how high a GPU you can go before the CPU or platform in general will become a bottleneck? I currently have an RX 570 which maxes out at 1440p 60hz

[@farasty7371]

You can probably pair a 1080ti with two of those xeon x5670's before they bottle neck the gpu.

[@charlesturner897]

It depends entirely on the game, I started running into bottlenecks with a 1080 and a pair of x5690s in my t5500, you also need to consider ram and bus speed, I moved to a z420 with an E5-1650v2, 1080 and 1866Mhz ram.

[@rafterman02]

Obviously that could cause my energy bills to go up, but luckily I could still plan on upgrading my OptiPlex 790 minitower with a GPU while retaining the i5-2400 and the 265W power supply.

[@remodesigns8121]

i think it's not, I have this one and no problem with the extra electricity bill.

[@xxslaygirllllxx6559]

theres 2 types of cpu heatsinks for the CPU on the motherboard that's why they look different you have the base model

[@mhyarm2131]

Thanks for sharing this, I have the same machine. any idea how to enable XMP of ram? I couldn't figure it out from the BIOS.

[@jwoolery99]

I don’t think it’s an option

[@tspryaviation]

I found my old T5400 while cleaning out my garage and I was curious how to upgrade it. Ik the DDR2 will be the issue at the end of the day. It has dual E5405 Xeons and 32GB ECC DDR2 RAM. Whats the best upgrade path I can take for CPU, RAM, and GPU?

[@nohesiloli]

Hi, 32gb is more than enough, upgrade the cpu's to x5650's 6c/12t each and the gpu to something in your budget like a GTX1060 or RTX2060 and it will be awesome. Also don't forget to get an SSD for your boot drive!

[@zacharyschwanke7160]

@Jordan Woolery im going to get one of thease do they all have dual 6 pin pcie connecters?

[@farasty7371]

Quick question: I have 1 xeon x5676 and 1 xeon x5670. Will these work together in a dell precision t5500?

[@jeffmitchell1003]

The processors need to be the same in order to work together e.g. 2x x5670

[@farasty7371]

@@jeffmitchell1003 Thanks for telling me that.

[@Phantom_Foxx]

Would of loved to see the logical cores graph in task manager during bench mark curious of hom much of all that it actually utilizes. I do have a good test for you if u still have it download NeosVR its free on steam and launch it in Desktop mode (choose advanced launcher and select screen mode) one of the few games ive played that takes my ryzen 5 3600 an hits all 6 cores and 12 threads evenly. i just wonder if it could do it with dual cpus.

[@jwoolery99]

I would bet that if it is multi-core aware, it should utilize both processors. But my internet is so poor right now that me trying to download *any* games is a nightmare in frustrating internet usage.

[@justhow9321]

Can this t5500 fit e-atx case? . Can i just swap like normal motherboard?

[@remodesigns8121]

i think not sure.

[@danydepp8487]

In GTA5 my T5500 shows 60 degrees. Is it possible that in your video the temp was from the riser processor an not from the main board processor?. That is the only thing i hate of that Dell CPU it seems the thermal design is not good for the main board.

[@IMCDundee]

IIRC dell did an upgraded heatsink for the cpu on the mainboard for higher wattage chips

[@jwoolery99]

Yeah I had a feeling there was something like that, something I don’t have of course lol

[@IMCDundee]

The 2nd CPU module already has the upgraded heatsink

[@IMCDundee]

I got my one for less than 20 pounds on ebay, worth a try.I think you need it for X5680 and above (130 watt each cpu)

[@IMCDundee]

mind you I got the T5500 for 100 pounds second hand anyway,the young guy that was selling it wanted a "Standard" gaming pc,and sold it to fund an FX8350 IIRC.

[@jwoolery99]

Yeah I’ve kept a close eye on temperatures while the system is under load, I’ve not seen any of the cores exceed any higher than like 67 degrees celsius on the smaller heatsink so honestly it should be fine, it’s within normal temperature limits under load. At idle it’s in the low to mid 30 degree range.

[@cadtech8947]

I currently have a t3500 with a damaged board can i get a t5500 motherboard as a replacement in thesame casing.

[@deweywsu]

Great video! Thanks for showing how to do this. Do you know if I could do the same thing with its little brother, the T5400? (It had a single E5410 processor stock, with I believe the same LGA processor footprint). Would I probably see a noticeable increase in speed with dual X5660s in it? Its RAM speed is only 667 MHz, so I wonder if that would become a bottleneck of sorts.

[@jwoolery99]

If I'm not mistaken, the T5400 uses LGA 771 (harpertown) processors, not 1366 (westmere). A noticeable giveaway to that is that it uses ECC DDR2 memory vs ECC DDR3. So unfortunately, based on your platform, unless a different chip is able to be used in the socket that I am not aware of, you are stuck to 4 cores per socket.

[@ClockworkAlex]

Did u have any problems installing win10 on T5500 ?? Thank's.

[@hoangtubehoangtube]

Window 10 is great

[@EargasmicAudioShackInternal]

Are they compatible with RTX 2xxx series card? I have a t5500 and I plan to reuse it but with rtx 2060s

[@unverifiedbiotic]

The old PCIe 2.0 standard might be a bottleneck, same as the CPU performance. The motherboard might also have issues, those components are a decade apart after all. My T5500 with an RX560 for some reason doesn't play nice with some games and I get terrible performance, while others run just fine.

[@EargasmicAudioShackInternal]

@@unverifiedbiotic Understood, it seems the T5500 prefers Nvidia cards, I currently have the RX570. I was planning to go for a gaming laptop for on the go renders. However, pandemic hit and I'm forced to reuse this again. Atm, locating RTX cards at MSRP is a chore.

[@unverifiedbiotic]

@@EargasmicAudioShackInternal Nvidia was all they put in those machines, got mine with a PNY Quadro 4000. This would be awesome for a CG workstation back in 2011 - double precision calculations, multiple video outputs (save for HDMI :D), a whopping 2GB of RAM... Alas, it was never meant for such use and just barely churns out 30 frames in games released back in 2015, not to mention handling effect previews and rendering in the current Adobe Premiere.

[@eduardom6271]

Hey Jordan, great video, very helpful indeed, just one quick question, do you think an Nvidia 3070 would fit in this T5500? Any compatibility problems? Thanks

[@jwoolery99]

Only concern I would have is the cooler might get in the way of the latching equipment for the expansion cards... other than that, not sure if the power supply will have the proper cables to adapt to the weird nvidia connector that they started putting on the newer cards, unless you plan on using an AIB card, then after that you’ll have to deal with the power supply’s two 6-pin PCIe power cables.

[@eduardom6271]

@@jwoolery99 Thanks for your response, what would you think is the best video card that fits and has no compatibility issues for the T5500?

[@jwoolery99]

@@eduardom6271 previously I was using a GTX 1650 in this system just fine, albeit I had to take out the mounting hardware for the expansion cards since I didn’t want to do any modification because the gpu cooler was quite large. I would recommend sticking to modern but entry or mid-level cards as the PCIe slot is limited to Gen 2.x bandwidth and it would not be a benefit to go RTX 3070 for example. RTX games are going to potentially struggle. I would honestly recommend if you can find one, go with a 5600 XT or 1660 Super.

[@eduardom6271]

@@jwoolery99 Thanks a lot!

[@v3rify.]

bottleneck city

[@wdd6864]

What is the Cinabench Score

[@jwoolery99]

For Cinebench R20, the dual X5650s score 2764 multicore. For comparison, my main Ryzen 7 2700X scores 3691 multicore.

[@JoseCampos-ux6vo]

I have two

[@v3rify.]

5.4 ghz is beefy holyyyyyy

[@jwoolery99]

That’s not 5.4 ghz...

[@bimba6115]

I have I3 4160 3.60 ghz , gtx 1060 3gb , 4gb ram "Can i run Gta V And Apex legends and CS:GO" how many can i get?

[@jwoolery99]

GTA V on 4gb ram is going to be a struggle. Apex Legends I think requires 8gb but I could be wrong, since I’m not into the battle royale thing. As far as CS:GO is concerned, that I think can run but you run the risk of the system running out of memory and causing stutter

[@someboringperson9359]

Why have so good GPU paired with i3 4160 and evem worser, 4 gigs of RAM!? Your PC doesnt have any sence

[@jwoolery99]

Could be that their budget is tight and they’re buying parts as they can afford to budget them. I’ve done that before, nothing wrong with that if that’s how you are building your pc. Yeah it’s not ideal but we aren’t made entirely of money so it’s understandable.

[@someboringperson9359]

@@jwoolery99 Yea, it could be that he is building or upgrading part by part(I done that myself with my pc) but still doesnt make sense to buy GTX 1060 before upgrading to better CPU or more RAM. I also kinda think that he bought used OEM pc and just snagged in a GTX 1060. But who knows.

[@bimba6115]

I3 and gtx 1060 3gb and 4gb ram and i have in cs go 300 fps easy 🙂

[@vitusvaldis1490]

Dude, your apartment is such a dump!

[@jwoolery99]

Congratulations it’s a dorm room and I don’t live there any more. Thanks for commenting on an old video with useless information nobody cares about.

[@vitusvaldis1490]

@@jwoolery99 Any time))