Core i7 920 to Xeon E5540 ES

I have changed a processor on my main computer to Xeon E5540 ES (2.53 GHz). I have received it from USA for a quite low price (I sold my Core i7 920 for the same price). The main purpose to change it was some curiosity to have an engineering sample and a lower TDP (which is 80W instead of 130W on XEON). What is more Xeon is workstation/server CPU which suits me more. I has a little lower clock rate (2.53 instead of 2.66) but faster QPI than (5.86 GT/s instead of 4.8 GT/s). You can find two scans of it in my cpu collection.

Update (2012-05-08):
I removed images from cpu collection album in webpicasa as I don't have this CPU anymore.

VT-310DP (VT8237R) and SATA II hard drive support mystery

As I wrote earlier I was planning to use my VT-310DP board for NAS server. It has an old VT8237R southbridge and support only SATA I mode and it can't recognize hard drive in SATA II mode automatically. In theory almost every SATA II hard drive in the market has an option to set 1.5Gbit/s performance (SATA I). Some of them use pins (WD, Seagate, Maxtor), other ones needs software solution (Samsung, Hitachi). However, this motherboard can't recognize many of them even if this mode is set. I have bought three Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB hard drives (SD1B and CC1G firmware). These drives used pins to set it to SATA I mode, however, VT-310DP didn't see them. The same problem I had with one Samsung 750GB hard drive (I used software solution to slow it down). However, this board recognized all WD drives with pin in it I had (current WD15EADS 1.5TB drive and older WD7500AACS 750GB GP). It also recognized an old Samsung HD160JJ with pin too. However, it didn't see newer 160 GB Samsung which hadn't pin and needed a software solution to slow down it (all current Samsung hard drives doesn't have a pin anymore). I have never tried Hitachi hard drives which uses software tool like Samsung too. I didn't find any clue about why some hard drives worked and other not too. Firstly I thought that a reason is software slow down and motherboard would recognize only hard drives with pins, however, seagate had denied this. I though that it might need spread spectrum enabled (some forum stated this), but WD hard drives worked with spread spectrum disabled. One thing is certain: hard drive has to work in SATA I mode but it is not enough...

So, if you have a motherboard with VT8237R southbridge and have problems with current hard drives I can only recommend Western Digital hard drives. They were only ones those worked as soon as I attached them (with pin, of course).