How to distinguish HPET cpu's

[zonar1982]

Does anyone know how you can tell which CPU supports HPET and which ones not?

I'm thinking of doing a build with some older xeons but it's never listed in the CPU specs...

Thx!
K.

 

[Adrian B]

Does anyone know how you can tell which CPU supports HPET and which ones not?

I'm thinking of doing a build with some older xeons but it's never listed in the CPU specs...

Thx!
K.

I did a quick google search and it looks as if it is a feature that you are able to enable or disable in some motherboard BIOS. I cannot find much more than that.

Adrian B

 

[zonar1982]

Yeah it's all very vage to me.

I own a Supermicro X7SB4 board with a Xeon E3310. This MB is from 2007 and does feature HPET in the bios with this CPU

My other supermicro X7DCA-3 board with 2 Xeon E5420 CPU's is from 2008 and does not have this setting in the Bios. They only mention "Multimedia Timer which was supposed to be the predecessor of HPET.

Supermicro technical support told me that HPET is CPU dependant and that the setting will show up in the Bios as soon as the CPU supports it...

Next thing is to update the bios on the X7DCA-3 from 2008 with a DOS boot cd or something. See if that helps.

THX!

 

[kasakka]

The setting is not necessarily available in BIOS even if the CPU supports it. It's completely up to the BIOS developers what options to include. For example my Abit IP35 had no option for HPET but it still worked fine with a Q9650.

I would imagine it is available on any Core 2 CPU and newer.