I recently set out on a quest to build a dual xeon, 16 core machine, for as cheap as possible. I purchased two early steppings of the E5-2650 eight core cpu (QA82) on ebay for about 400$ and a Asrock ep2c602-4l/d16 motherboard for another 200$. When none of the bioses available on the asrock rack webpage allowed me to post, I wrote the Asrock support team and was surprised to what lengths they went to help me! The engineering team sent me this bios with what appears to be the microcode to allow me to post with one QA82 eight core cpu. Yayy!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1440...602_4D1.02
I've been using this bios for the last month without any crashes, but I read elsewhere that it is best to disable APIC / APM and maybe even Gen3 PCI-E in the bios to make these B0 stepping cpu's 100% stable. If your running a server, then it's not detrimental.
Unfortunetly the second CPU is never recognized with this bios. Can it be a simple tweak to add the microcode for the second socket? Either they forgot to do it, or they copied bios code from one of their single socket motherboards to make this work halfway. I am very grateful to them but would absolutely LOVE to get dual cpu support for these early steppings. Otherwise I may have to resort to buying some more expensive Asus Z9PE-D8 boards that are known to support ES cpu's with 3302 version bios.
![.zip]()
EP2C602_4LD16_BIOS_102.zip (Size: 3.83 MB / Downloads: 0)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1440...602_4D1.02
I've been using this bios for the last month without any crashes, but I read elsewhere that it is best to disable APIC / APM and maybe even Gen3 PCI-E in the bios to make these B0 stepping cpu's 100% stable. If your running a server, then it's not detrimental.
Unfortunetly the second CPU is never recognized with this bios. Can it be a simple tweak to add the microcode for the second socket? Either they forgot to do it, or they copied bios code from one of their single socket motherboards to make this work halfway. I am very grateful to them but would absolutely LOVE to get dual cpu support for these early steppings. Otherwise I may have to resort to buying some more expensive Asus Z9PE-D8 boards that are known to support ES cpu's with 3302 version bios.
EP2C602_4LD16_BIOS_102.zip (Size: 3.83 MB / Downloads: 0)