Is this VRD 11.0 compliant?

[goriath]

Hi everybody,

I have an LGA775 motherboard. it's a board from Lenovo ThinkCentre A53 system, it is called L-S662F. The motherboard officially supports Pentium/Celeron D and Pentium 4 CPUs. Actually I have a Celeron D 346 installed but this CPU is really a crap so I'm thinking to upgrade with something better; a dual-core CPU would be great. But I would like to avoid the old Netburst architecture of Pentium D, they goes hot and are power consuming, so I was wondering if I could install a Core 2 Duo, an E4300 for example, since the board has SiS662 chipset that is compatible with these processors. So, I searched for a BIOS upgrade and I found the latest at Lenovo site. In the release note of the BIOS is stated that a previous release of the bios brought support for "Core CPU". This is just the info I wanted to know and it seems to be good news, but as wikipedia states:

Although a motherboard may have the required chipset to support Conroe, some motherboards based on the above-mentioned chipsets do not support Conroe. This is because all Conroe-based processors require a new power delivery feature set specified in >>Voltage Regulator-Down (VRD) 11.0<<. This requirement is a result of Conroe's significantly lower power consumption, compared to the Pentium 4/D CPUs it is replacing. A motherboard that has both a supporting chipset and VRD 11 supports Conroe processors, but even then some boards will need an updated BIOS to recognize Conroe's FID (Frequency ID) and VID (Voltage ID).

So I have a motherboard with a compatible chipset and more likely with the right BIOS to support a Core 2 Duo but I dont' know if the power supply circuit is designed also to support these CPUs. I made some googling and I found some encouraging clues, like the fact the board uses polymer solid-state caps (I don't know if it is significant but I found these caps on all C2D motherboards) and has 4-phase controller, the >>ADP3198<<, which I found on many C2D board as well.

I took a picture of the CPU layout of the board. It is a 3-phase power design with Fujitsu caps:


Now, you might notice that if does exist a BIOS that supports C2D CPUs that's would be enough to prove there is a compatibility. Since I want to be as much sure as I can first to buy a new processor, I want to ask here if someone could give me any help.

Many many thanks

[mockingbird]

Re: Is this VRD 11.0 compliant?

If they themselves state that it does, then it does...

Just stay away from 1333mhz FSB Core2 chips as well as 45nm Core2 chips.

Something like an E6600 should work perfectly. Just check if your RAM is PC2-5300 and not PC2-4200. Your system might downlcock the CPU if it is, but that's don't such a big deal. And don't quote me on that. Also, they sell for less than $5 shipped on eBay.