Upgrading an older Xeon Server

[dawks]

We have an older Dell running a Xeon 5130 LGA 771. Its still working great for us, but I noticed we can get a Xeon 5260 LGA 771 for $60 from Newegg. Going from 2.0Ghz to 3.33Ghz would probably be a nice bump. I just wanted to check if there's any reason this wouldn't work? Any reason a 'refurbished' processor is a bad idea?

Its a VMware ESXi box hosting Active Directory, DNS, MSSQL, File & Print services..


Edit: this thread is shedding some light, at dell. I think my server is a II model so the 5200 series might not work.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

No reason it's a bad idea, really - as long as the motherboard supports the faster CPU.

The usual caveats about taking down an in-use production server and spending money on a machine when something else might fail in a week apply, of course.

And of course, you should be looking at your workload and determining what your actual bottleneck is - a 50% clock speed increase might mean diddly if your SQL database is already RAM or disk I/O limited.

(SQL is often RAM-limited, and file sharing is usually bottlenecked by disk I/O or network bandwidth, except in NAS appliances with very weak CPUs.)