Mac Pro woodcrest -> clovertown upgrade issues

[Fooberman]

I have a Mac Pro I inherited from a coworker, it came with two dual-core Woodcrest 3.0 GHz Xeons, 4 GB memory, etc. I recently upgraded it to a pair of 2.0 GHz clovertowns (more cores are more important to my work than clock speed), and I'm having, shall we say, mixed success.

Booting into OS X, the system crawls along at several orders of magnitude slower than it should. The grey pinwheel progress bar at the gray apple logo screen on bootup pokes along at one tick every 7 seconds or so. When the login screen finally appears, the cursor blinks every 12-14 seconds, keystrokes take many many seconds to register. I never got past the log in screen.

The same issues are experienced when booting from the OS X 10.5 install DVD.

Here's where it gets interesting. My Vista 64 boot camp partition boots and runs just fine. I'm using it to post this message, in fact. It recognizes all 8 cores and everything.

Has anyone here heard of such an experience?? Is there a way i can get into the EFI and get more information about what's going on, and why these chips are freaking out OS X, but Vista doesn't care?

 

[cal6n]

What type are your new processors? IIRC, the 2 GHz ones should be X5335.

 

[Fooberman]

No, these are the E5335 series (the wimpiest clovertowns). Attached is an image of CPU-Z's report.

 

[cal6n]

Yeah, they're the right ones (The X prefix is for the faster models). All the accepted wisdom says you should have no problems. I dropped a pair of X5355s into my mine last year and they've been good as gold.

It's difficult to think of something that would hamper OS X but not windows. I'm assuming that you cleaned off all traces of the old thermal paste and applied a new thin uniform layer. Did you remember to re-connect the heat-sink temperature sensors? Windows is notoriously lax in its temperature control, while OS X is totally anal!

You could try resetting your PRAM or your SMC. Other than that, I'd say it's time to run the hardware test from your original install disc.

 

[bearcatrp]

What kind of temps are you getting from your new chips? I recently changed from quad 2ghz to octo 2.33ghz. No problems except higher processor temps. I have experienced sluggish performance when it runs hot. I run smcfancontrol to keep the temps down below 115 degrees. if your temps are super high, suggest you reinstall those chips.

 

[Fooberman]

Vista program to check CPU temps on Mac hardware

OK, those are good ideas. How do I check the CPU temp from a windows Vista installation under Boot Camp? The machine is unusable in OS X until i fix this, or reinstall the old chips.

 

[Fooberman]

Ok

I checked the temperatures using SpeedFan in Vista, and they don't seem too hot to run. the first chip averages around 45 C, the other around 35 C. This is when mostly idle, +10 C when running Supreme Commander. I would be surprised if OS X went bonkers over this.

 

[cal6n]

I'm seeing 31-38°c minimum for all 8 cores and 54-60°c Max under load in OS X.

Does speedfan report heatsink temps? How about the ambient temp sensor?

 

[bearcatrp]

I checked the temperatures using SpeedFan in Vista, and they don't seem too hot to run. the first chip averages around 45 C, the other around 35 C. This is when mostly idle, +10 C when running Supreme Commander. I would be surprised if OS X went bonkers over this.

use smcfancontrol in OS X and turn the fans up to around 750or higher to keep the temp closer to 100 to 105 degrees. If speed fan lets you control the fans (never used this), crank them up as well. I have noticed my mac pro gets sluggish when temps get above 110 degrees.

 

[Fooberman]

Update

OK, i think i figured out what's going on here....

It turns out that the chips are different models. The System control panel in Windows assumes they are the same and only reports the first socket. CPUZ tells the full story.

(In case you're wondering how this happened, the chips are Intel engineering samples, not products from the shelf, so it was only on my co-worker's word that they were what they were. We both work at Intel).

SO... this explains the temperature difference. Can I underclock the higher clocked chip so that they match, or will OS X still notice they are different models and refuse to run correctly ?