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.
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 CPUs. 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.
I did some research and decided the best CPU for me, price/performance/availability wise, was the AMD Athlon II X4 640 CPU, which is a 3.0Ghz Quad Core, which it seemed likely would work. It’s also still widely available in the UK new (I got mine from Amazon for 50 quid in February 2013) which is not the case for many of the alternatives (if you can find a 645 that should work and is slightly faster).
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.
You may need to update the BIOS (before changing the CPU) in order to get it working. See below for some notes on that process as there’s a few gotchas with BIOS updating on this hardware.
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 you’d get one normal boot, and then the same again.
BIOS Update
There’s a weird issue with the BIOS on this machine: even if you don’t 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.