Has anyone ever tried two quad-core E5345 in an IBM 9228?

[Sphexi]

Got an older 9228 that I'm going to move my ESXI server over to, want to change it up from a dual core Xeon to two quad-core. Need to source out the VRM and the CPUs, I'm looking at the E5345 right now. I see confirmation on the faster X5365 chips working, so I see no reason why the slower ones wouldn't?

Anyone tried this before, I've spent some time looking and had little luck, although I see a lot of ads online from companies mostly in China selling 9228 setups with the E5345 chips, so it seems possible.

 

[Sphexi]

To answer my own question (and provide someone else the ability to find this in the future), yes it does work. I didn't get E5345 chips because they were scarce enough to be slightly more expensive than I wanted to go, but two E5335 (2.0ghz) were roughly $50 shipped from ebay and work perfectly.

I hacked the BIOS to allow VT, and every boot-up it complains it doesn't like the stepping, but ESXI 5.1 is booted up and recognizes a full 8 cores running at full speed, so I'm happy.

Biggest issue was finding the heatsink/fan that worked with this case and mobo, I was lucky to find one on ebay but only one.

 

[Ketchup]

Glad you figured it out. IBM is very good at hiding their information. I work with IBM equipment on a daily basis (I don't work for them directly), and I still couldn't tell you for sure if that would work.

 

[Sphexi]

To be sure I don't expect IBM ever meant for this to work. I'm using the latest version of the BIOS, 1.45, which was released at or before the quad-core E5 series was. Luckily the Intel chipset used works fine on it (other suppliers support this), so even though the BIOS whines a bit, it boots up and I've moved my VM stores over without an issue.