I recently bought a 8450 Phenom Tri-Core processor. As my old one mucked up when my motherboard did.


I replaced my motherboard with a Gigabyte MA770-DS3 (I think... will double check in a minute) and when I managed to get all the components together and working, it all seemed to work.

However, I was messing around on OCCT, seeing how hot my cores were... and I suddenly realised that I had a reading for core 1. Another reading for core 2. And no reading for core 3.

Also, when telling my CPU to run at 100% (for testing) it was running at 60-70% in OCCT. That's 2/3 for those that don't know that much math.

However, in Task Manager I can see the actions of all three cores... although core three seems to never do much, even if I decide to run lots and lots of things and my first two cores are at 100%. I don't think I've ever seen my third core go higher than about 20-30%... or about the idle speed of the other two (Vista takes up a fair bit of processing... especially when your idle includes lots of background programs running )

So tell me: is this the motherboard or OCCT?
I've not had any driver updates for it since I got it (about two weeks ago)