[geeks] Any Ultra 20 owners out there?

[Lionel Peterson]

Hello all,

I've started to work with my Ultra 20 more, and as such I decided to upgrade the processor before 939 socket upgrade CPUs become hard to find. I looked around a bit, and found the following:

There was ONE reference of an individual upgrading the U20 to an Opteron 165 (dual 1.8 GHz w/1 Meg cache per CPU).

The Ultra 20 User Guide describes upgrading the processor to an Opteron 180 (2.4 GHz w/1 Meg cach per CPU) (it further says that this is the ONLY CPU upgrade possible by someone other that a Sun FE).

I decided to go for the Opteron 165 ($154 from Newegg.com), based on price and overclock-ability (The Opteron 180 is about $260). The processor arrived today, and the upgrade took 20 minutes, tops. I had previously upgraded the BIOS to the latest version (from Support Disc 1.6 for the Ultra 20), so that may be a factor in the simplicity of the upgrade.

Also, before I upgraded the BIOS/CPU, I tinkered with the CPU Freq., going from 200 MHz to 205 MHz, but the ability to tweak the BIOS Freq. speed is not in the latest BIOS, so my CPU is running at an eye-poping 1.85 GHz ;^) I am considering taking the BIOS back to an earlier Revision, in hopes of finding the speed adjustment - I would like to take this up to 2.2 GHz. The BIOS used to offer a +50 MHz adjustment, and I'm hoping I can find that option again...

I used the cooling solution that came with the new CPU, it has 4 pipes where the original piece had two, so I decided it was "better", though it otherwise looks smaller...

Anyone else upgrade their Ultra 20s?

I currently have 2x 160 Gig SATA II HDs (I plan on taking the other two SATA connections out to a backpanel eSATA panel), but aside from the above the system is original...

Wonder how much I need to keep in the box to keep my Sun hardware contract in-tact.

Lionel