HP ML115 G5 Upgrades

CMS, Website, Technical

Posted by Sam Bartle on 1 Feb 2019

Do you own an HP Proliant ML115? Looking for a bit more power than the official specifications say you can have? Want to play games on it, if so this is the post for you.

WARNNG: You could do irreversible damage by following any of the information on this page. You are obviously on your own if you try anything here. I offer no guarantees, however I have personally tried everything here and it all worked for me.

CPU Upgrade

The CPU originally supplied with my Proliant was an AMD opteron 1214 2.2Ghz Dual Core model, as I now use the machine for gaming I wanted something a bit faster.. After some research I found a site (in Japanese) which seemed to be listing compatible CPU's, It's not obvious what any of it means though (I think O means working, and X means not, with - meaning not sure), so I knew I may have to just take a bit of a chance.

The best option seems to actually be the AMD Phenom II X4 955 (But NOT the Black Edition) which is 3.2Ghz Quad Core but with Extra L3 Cache (6MB) and seemed like it would work, however this was unavailable new in the UK, and all the used ones were selling for way more than I was willing to pay, the Athlon II seemed likely to offer much better bang for the buck, another possibility (also discounted because of the prohibitive pricing in the UK) is the Phenom II X4 940 (But again NOT the Black Edition) which is essentially the same as the Athlon II X4 640, but with the extra L3 cache.

I'm happy to say that although the BIOS doesn't recognise the model, it all works just fine! It's detected as an AMD Unknown 3000Mhz Quad Core CPU.

GPU Upgrades

This machine has a 16x PCIe slot and you'd think that meant GPU upgrades were easy, and this is usually the case, I currently have a Palit nVidia GTX 650 1GB OC in there which works fine, as did my older MSI nVidia 7900GTX, however my XFX nVidia 8800GTX didn't work reliably and caused all sorts of problems, it would boot once normally and be fine, but subsequently fail to POST until you reset the BIOS at which point youd get one normal boot, and then the same again.

BIOS Update

Theres a weird issue with the BIOS on this machine, even if you dont own the RiLOe card, you need to apply the update for it, otherwise after updating the BIOS the fan will run at 100% all the time, making the machine sound like a jet plane. Annoying, but easy to fix at least.

WARNNG: You could do irreversible damage by following any of the information on this page. You are obviously on your own if you try anything here. I offer no guarantees, however I have personally tried everything here and it all worked for me.