Ima nube asking dumb question 7720 chip questions.

[Sycorexx]

Hoping to learn something new alongside my son. I’m mechanical and a part time manual machinist but barely know my way around an iPhone. If you’re offended by a lack of knowledge you’re going to hate seeing my posts.

in my field I’m known as a master franckenstiener and fab shop. I have a love for making crazy combos look factory.

also known for bringing centuries old machines back to work, so there’s a pattern to my dimensia. Everything I do is cheaper than a college education, that’s my philosophy about the money. I’m not looking for a good but cheap laptop I’m looking to see with my own eyes how and why a laptop works or/and doesn’t. 
I bought a 7720 with a 6820 chipset. I also bought a motherboard with a Xeon 1575 chipset and some “bad” motherboards so I can work my way around and see how the power flows. (Here’s where I go crazy).

live read 7750’s boards port out the back so they’re not compatible with a 7720 chassis. BUT the Intel Xeon W-10885M chip has 8 cores but a lower idle mhz. Both chips take the same socket, question is would all the drivers work if the only thing swapped is the Intel Xeon W-10885M onto a 7720 motherboard?

This isn’t about the money, it’s about the education. I will be looking for a shop that’s willing to help in these endeavors so if you know any hot rodders out there please point me in their direction. 
Thanks guys,

Dean

[Aaron44126]

You are right that these CPUs use the same "socket" — though "socket" is a bit of a misnomer because the chips aren't removable from the motherboard without microsoldering work.  You'd need someone who knows what they're doing to make the chip swap.

 

You're also right that Precision 7750 boards won't fit in a 7720.  At this time Dell was doing an "every other generation" chassis refresh — so you can use (most) 7710 components in a 7720 (and vice versa), and 7730/7740, and 7750/7760, and 7770/7780, but if you go outside of those pairings then things get a lot more hairy.

 

But the CPU socket is the same still.  Would it work if you swapped them?  Wish I could say.  I've seen chatter about "attempting" this sort of thing before but I've never heard from anyone who actually tried it.  Drivers shouldn't be a problem, the only "driver" that would really be different would be the Intel integrated GPU driver and you could grab that one from the Precision 7750 support site (or, Windows Update would probably pull it down automatically).

 

There could be other reasons that this would not work.  Will the Precision 7720 BIOS throw up if it encounters an Intel 10th-gen CPU?  Will the 10th-gen Xeon be happy to talk to the older PCH in the 7720?  Are there actually changes or additions to the CPU pinout between these different generations that we don't know about?

 

On desktops you can generally assume that any CPU that "fits" into a socket will be compatible with whatever motherboard.  (Sometimes a BIOS update is necessary to fully support new CPUs in an old motherboard.)  On the laptop side, the engineers are able to assume that you'll only ever use the system in the configurations that they ship out of the factory, so they probably didn't take any steps to support and definitely did not test "new CPUs in an old system".

 

And because of the physical difficulty in making the chip swap, it's not a common thing to mess around with even for us tinkerers.

[Sycorexx]

Thanks for the reply. Ive bought some bad motherboards to practice cpu swapping. Once I get semi confident I’ve got it down I’ll buy one in working condition and do a swap and test it. Eventually I’ll get to attempting an actual set up.