AMD Athlon 2650e, motherboard support in general

[slux]

Hi,

The Athlon 2650e seems to me like it might be a good AMD equivalent for Intel Atom. It seems to be readily available on eBay as a used part for fairly cheap too.The problem is that as it is only available to OEMs it isn't featured on many (any?) motherboard CPU support lists.

Does this mean I can't pair it with anything else than what the OEMs supply it with or are some motherboards able to support CPUs that they may not be advertised as supporting. If they are, how can I determine whether that might be the case for the 2650e (or even 3250e) for a particular motherboard?

Thanks for the excellent site & forum, I've been researching for a while here and am pretty close to ordering some low power consumption parts for my home server but this question of whether the 2650e is an option bothers me for now.

[ilovejedd]

Iirc, it's just a very low power version of Brisbane and is a standard AM2 (or was it AM2+/AM3?) part. The Dell Zino HD uses a 780G motherboard so I'm guessing it's probably safe to pair it with that.

[slux]

Iirc, it's just a very low power version of Brisbane and is a standard AM2 (or was it AM2+/AM3?) part. The Dell Zino HD uses a 780G motherboard so I'm guessing it's probably safe to pair it with that.

But could the BIOS refuse to boot with it because it doesn't recognise it for example? What does it use to determine the processor and could it block using one if it isn't satisfied with whatever criteria it has? I'm inclined to think it could as I have an ancient experience of trying to put a slot 1 P3 to a system that had a slot 1 P2 and it refused to boot.

I noticed it has the same family/model/stepping (although there seem to be two different values of stepping for any processor... the letter-number combination and just a number) values as some other processors, for example but is that even relevant?

If it only worked with 780G the low consumption processor would be wasted in a way as I understand the 780G isn't particularly good in that respect. I was thinking of going with an GF7025/7050.

Seems to me it boils down to either 1. the processor support lists for a mobo aren't definitive, or 2. The BIOS sees the processor as being identical to some other one that it supports so it isn't a problem at all.

Lacking reassurance, I wish I could find at least one report of someone successfully using such a processor with other motherboards. The Anandtech article seems to suggest they used something else than the Zino motherboard but they never really said it straight.

[slux]

Well, apparently at least the J&W MINIX 780G-SP128 does support the more powerful dual-core 3250e X2, it has been used on this thread at Xtremesystems. Someone on Tom's also states that these should work on "most am2+am3 boards", whatever that means...

So I guess there is at least a chance that it will work in a random motherboard put it on judging from those. Too bad the most likely candidates seem to be AMD chipsets as the Nvidia one would be the way to go for a really low power consumption system.

[Vicotnik]

Anandtech says:
"The 2650e is a single-core K8 based Socket-AM2/AM2+ processor that runs at 1.6GHz. It’s got 512KB of L2 cache and the rest of the feature set of the older K8 AM2 processors. As an AM2 chip it’s DDR2 only and physically won’t fit or work in an AM3 motherboard. Keep that in mind before you go sticking one of these where it doesn’t belong."
- http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... spx?i=3703

[zodaex]

I would also would like to know a solid answer on the OP's question. Like I put an athlon xp 1900+ palamino in a motherboard that doesn't recognize the cpu, so it shows up as an "unknown cpu" in my bios and in windows, and it bothers me. Not sure if there are any negatives other than the name not showing up though.