Mitch,
Thanks for the info. I have no need to change mine, my E8200 is running nice and cool. But I'll pass the info on to the fellow that was asking, he thinks 1200 RPM is too noisy .

Is there a post on the board for how to 'roll your own' video/keyboard/mouse cable? I only found info on making a monitor-only cable, or buying a pre-made hookup for $90. I know my way around a soldering iron and crimpers, I just need the pinouts....

Mike

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Hi Guys,

I just dropped an e7500 processor into my ex490. When I first booted up after the swap, the status/health light is blinking red and aqua. I rebooted a few more times and was hoping that the server will come back to life, however that wasn't the case. I opened it up again to reseat the processor, heat sink and apply more AS5 stuff. After all, Its still blinking red and aqua at 1st reboot. At this point, I decided to do a Server Recovery, the recovery process successfully completed. However when I first configured it through the Media Server setup program/utility, I've got to where it's checking and applying new update (presumably 3.0.1 update), however the upgrade process seems to stuck @ 67%.

All the lights (power, network, health/status as well as the hard drive lights) on ex490 are currently blinking or pausing- anyone has any ideas why its doing this? I was thinking to perhaps rerun the Server Recovery again this afternoon. Having said that My current Temps and Fan Speed seem to be correct at 44C at idle.

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EX485 Stock
EX490 - E7500 - Stock 1TB and 3 1.5TB Hard Drives

My E6300 went in without a hitch, and Alex's guide contained more than adequate information to perform the switch. I spent a few bux on Arctic Silver's cleaning kit and read the application instructions on their website and prepared the CPU and heat sink in accordance with those instructions. They indicate about 200 hours and several heat cycles are needed to break-in the thermal grease. Just like breaking in my BMW - keep it under 100mph and vary the throttle for the first 1500 miles... (but the CPU temp seems to be holding steady at 36°C)

I rebooted twice during the process. After the first reboot the Home Server Console was throwing exceptions like those in the post above mine, but the second reboot solved those. The machine is definitely much more responsive now. I found it to be nearly unusable with the Celeron CPU.

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Synology DS411: 2 * WD20EARX and 2 * WD20EARS
DIY Small Business Server 2011
MP 8-core 2.26GHz, 2012 MBA13 i7/8GB/256GB, AppleTVs, iPhone

Just popped in my E8400 and 4GB chip. Took no more than 15 minutes to do. System started up without a hitch. Video conversion is flying now and everything seems much faster. Right now CPU load is sitting at around 70-75% and temps are between 59-62C.

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HP EX490 | E8400 | 4GB | 1x1.5TB SEA | 3x2TB WD GP

Hi guys,

First time post, and I thought it would be good to give something back to the forums given all the help they've provided me.

The first thing I've played with is upgrading the EX490's CPU to a Q9550S. It works and sits at around 40C at idle and at 100% normally sits at 65C when at 100% load (can peak at 75C depending on ambient temps). As a side note, AS-5 made about a 5-10C difference to the idle temp.

I've modified the fan speeds in the BIOS (thanks to the most excellent cable made by Charles) and enabled the virtualisation feature on the CPU (see pics)

Interesting to note that the BIOS changes the fields depending on what is connected - you can also boot from USB and set the USB device to be the first to boot. This can be very handy if you want to attempt a recovery before a re-install.

Attached are the happy snaps (sorry for the fuzzy camera shots of the bios) for your entertainment.

Cheers,

- I

Welcome to the forums.

Impressive. Thanks for the sharing your success with the quad core.

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HP MSS EX490 with Intel E6300
4 GB RAM
7 TB Drive Storage

MediaSmartServer.net Wiki, it's loaded with helpful information about WHS and the HP MediaSmart Server.

issaqua,

Have you run the Q9550 with the HP Video Converter? How much of a difference do you see?
what do the temps look like with nearly a %100 load with all 4 cores? The converter is probably the only application that can do that (that would normally be running)

FYI, Microcenter had the Q9550 for $169.99, they seem to run out, and then get them back in at the beginning of the next month.

Mitch

I just can't get into the BIOS with my USB keyboard. I did install Acronis with the Startup Recovery Manager which adds F11 to the boot sequence. If I hit F11 I'll get into Acronic but if I try DELETE to get into the BOIS, it just ignores it.

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

did you install the 2 pin jumper? that is needed, or you won't be able to get into the BIOS. The jumper is located very close the the where the cable plugs into the motherboard... it is the only one in the area that is open.

Mitch

Yes, I did that. I even tried again with a different jumper.

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

you might have to use a PS/2 keyboard initially, and once you get into the BIOS, enable USB support for kyb/mouse, it might be disabled... in which case, you would have exactly your problem..

Mitch

Hi Mitch,

I stress tested the CPU's with prime95 under windows and the peak temperature was 75C. Even though CPU-Z shows it as a Q9550, it is a Q9550S. The S series (low power) is designed for environments with restrictions on cooling and as a result will regulate its temperature once over about 73C (at the cost of performance). As always, read the vendor (Intel) spec sheets before purchasing.

Once I'd applied arctic silver 5 the full load temps initially peak to 75C, but then very quickly settled consistently at about 65C - ambient temp was around 24C. Currently I've rate limited the CPU's to 2GHz (from 2.8) to do the first level of burn in and at 100% CPU utilisation, it is sitting at consistently at 55C.

I've not been doing any video conversion - I've not done enough with this to determine where the bottlenecks are and if this would mitigate them. If CPU is the bottleneck, then this may make a difference, but there are the issues around memory I/O and latency, then the same again for storage and network.

My set up may look like overkill, but my plans are around consolidating my storage and VM's on to the one box, playing with iSCSI, HSM to my Centurion DiscHub (via DVD-RAM), etc..

Cheers,

- I.

In my experience, CPU is the bottleneck for video transcoding. I primarily use Handbrake for this. It supports multiple cores and hyperthreading. All 16 virtual cores in my 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro are active when Handbrake is transcoding.

_________________
Synology DS411: 2 * WD20EARX and 2 * WD20EARS
DIY Small Business Server 2011
MP 8-core 2.26GHz, 2012 MBA13 i7/8GB/256GB, AppleTVs, iPhone

Can you please elaborate on this point?

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Hi Yakuza,

Sure, the two things I noticed change were the "configure advanced cpu settings" (see image0001 in my first post) and the boot order (see image0003) changes depending on what devices are connected.

If memory serves me correctly, the advanced CPU settings added the virtualisation, speedstep and a couple of other options in contrast to the original Celeron in the EX490 that did not have those features.

When I had USB and a hard drive connected, it also gave me a third option (not shown in image0003) of selecting the boot order of the "hard drives" (including the USB device). If anyone needs me to take a snapshot of this, let me know and I'll post.

One additional thing I noticed is that the backplane always reads -128C - even when fully reassembled. I'm not fussed, because the BIOS seems to use the CPU temp (PECI) as the key factor in setting the fan speeds.

Cheers,

-I.