[cobalt-users] RAQ3 CPU Upgrade to match RAQ4's? Anyone tried it??

["Jerry Farquhar" <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

We have a couple of Raq Servers and decided to live a little on the edge
before putting them back into service.

As a curiosity we removed the heat sinks from both to determine the true CPU
that was being used and found that the Raq3i has a AMD K6-2 3D Now CPU
running at 300 MHz and the Raq4r has a AMD K6-2 3D Now CPU running at 475
MHz (oddly enough the the Raq4r is stated by Cobalt to be a 450 MHz CPU.
But then again Cobalt has also told me that they used Intel CPU's not AMD).
Any way as we tempted fate we decided to swap the Hard drives & CPU from the
Raq4r and install them in the Raq3i and see if it had any problem with the
faster CPU, the Raq4r's O/S and RAID configuration.

Bottom line is that everything worked fine except for the system identifying
the faster CPU at it's true speed of 475 MHz (I personally would have even
been happy with what Cobalt calls it a 450 Mhz CPU).  But no... it only
reported the CPU at 299.8 MHz which is what the Raq3i reported it original
CPU speed to be.

Where I'm going with this is that both system boards look to be virtually
identical aside from a few serial number or manufacturing number
differences.  The goal here is to gain a little added low cost muscle by
upgrading the CPU's in this Raq3i and several others we have if this plan is
made successful.  Current K6-2 3D Now 475 MHz CPU's are going for all of
$32.00.   So as you can see as I can that it makes for a very reasonable
performance upgrade if the speed issue can be corrected.

My main question here is do any of you Super Techies out there know how
Cobalt defines the CPU speed on these systems.  If so please share your
wealth of knowledge in this area.. I'm sure there are quite a few users out
there that would love to know how to benefit from a low cost CPU upgrade to
gain a little extra performance and longer life out of their Raq3's and
basically turn them into Raq4's for under $50.00.

FYI # 1 - I got the idea about the CPU swap from a Cobalt tech support
person who also assumed as I did simply swapping in a new CPU should be an
easy upgrade.

Note: For what it's worth technically an AMD K6-2 3D Now 550 MHz CPU should
work also since it's in the same family of CPU's.  Even a 550 CPU is under
$50.00 if you shop it around.

Of course heat is always an issue when going with a faster CPU but
personally I doubt that there would be so much additional heat by increasing
the CPU from a 475 MHz to even the 550 Mhz.  An idea I've considered has
been to add an additional fan the same size as the one that vents the air
for the CPU out side the Raq and simply use longer screws to hold both fans
in place.

FYI # 2 - The RAID feature built into the Raq4r's O/S works great with the
Raq3i system board.

PS - As mentioned above everything was working great except for the CPU
speed being reported till I decided to start installing the Raq4 Service
Packs (all 30 of them at current count).  As soon as I installed the first
one and rebooted the Raq3i that had been converted to a Raq4r, it decided it
didn't remember it's IP address or name but all the services reported in the
LCD panel seemed to start up properly.  After repeated attempts to input a
new IP address through the front and the system forgetting the address each
time it rebooted after the information was input I called it quits for the
day and will likely contact Cobalt to see if this is a relatively common
problem that simply needs a local telnet session into the server to correct.
That's my guess.. a simple little hiccup..  The real test will be to get the
CPU speed issue resolved and all service packs installed and the unit tested
for stability with some load on it.

Hope everyone who celebrates the 4th of July has a great holiday and I look
forward to any helpful feed back.

Thanks!!

Jerry
jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx