Acer Aspire X3950 add i7-870 support

[car46999]

Bought an old Acer X3950 for a garage PC, it had the original i3-540 processor in it when I bought it. It boots and runs Windows 7 great, but I wanted to upgrade the processor to an i7-870.

The Acer service manual states the the i7-870 was an option, so I thought I should be able to just swap it in. But neither of two i7-870 processors I have both do not boot. After the power button is pressed I get a black screen and a long beep and then two short beeps (this repeats).

The Acer service manual suggest a VGA or graphics error for this beep pattern, but the hardware seems fine since I can switch back to the i3-540 and all is well.

My issue seems similar to this post https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/showthre...?tid=37973. Possibly I need a microcode update, but I could not see how to do that myself.

I ran cpu-z and MEinfo and attached the results.

Any help would be great.

[DeathBringer]

Show a screenshot of Device Manager with expanded Display adapter node.

[car46999]

Show a screenshot of Device Manager with expanded Display adapter node.

Here is the screenshot of the display adapter. It is running the built in Intel graphics card, no other graphics cards installed.

[DeathBringer]

i7-870 hasn't integrated GPU. So you need to install any PCI-E graphics card.

[car46999]

i7-870 hasn't integrated GPU. So you need to install any PCI-E graphics card.

Ah, I thought the integrated graphics would be on the mainboard. I will give that a try and report back.

[car46999]

I had an old Radeon HD 8490 OEM laying around, the lack of an external graphics card was the issue. Thank you for the help!