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Was looking around in the BIOS of my PC as you do on a Saturday night and thought I'd change a few settings.....
Early days yet but stable so far.
Only difference now is Coretemp can't tell the temp of my CPU ( although Speedfan seems to be doing okay)
Nice to buy an X3 and end up with an X4, thanks AMD
Sounds like an early batch. Later Athlon II X3s only unlock to Athlon II x4 as they have no l3 cache rather than locked l3 cache.
Still - congrats and welcome to the club (I'm running an Athlon X2 5000+ 45nm @ Phenom FX-5000 x4 with a 50% overclock - about equivalent to a PII 955). Very nice performance for not much money.
Thats nice, its great to get that extra bit for free. I unlocked only one core on an Athlon X2 5000+
but it gave more cache 6MB instead of 2MB , it is just for the fun as the system is only going to be used for light duty and as a media center, HTPC.
So I will probably put it back as a two core to save the electric bills when I'm finished playing about.
nice one as they say.
I'm not overclocking as truth be told even the X3 in stock form is enough processing power for what the machine is used for (daughter surfs for course work/ a few Word docs/ children's games)
Although the CPU is recognised by Windows 7 and CPU-Z as a Phenom II X4, in CPU-Z the L3 cache is greyed out - is there a way to "unlock" that as well?
I never managed to unlock my 720. What motherboard are you using ?
"Although the CPU is recognised by Windows 7 and CPU-Z as a Phenom II X4, in CPU-Z the L3 cache is greyed out - is there a way to "unlock" that as well?"
My Gigabyte board did not have any specific cache setting option it just was reported by CPU-Z after unlocking the other core.
Asus M3A78-TQuote:
Originally Posted by Sputnik
Its an AM2+ Board with the 790GX/SB750 chipset that allows unlocking
I'm using a Jetway Ha08 Combo - again 790GX/SB750.
My J&W has the 790GX/SB750 chipset and is supposed to be a good board for overclocking but, I've never managed to unlock the 4th core. Maybe I just have a triple core with a truly broken 4th core?
Man these AMDs sound exciting, I really want one over an Intel. Good price/performance!
my media pc ran an am3 550 unlocked to 4 cores but wasnt prime stable, booted into windows fine but couldnt cope with the load.
Fitted a standard 955 cooler to it, dropped it down to 3 cores, applied some AS5 TIM, temps 23-26 degrees idle, prime stable for 26hours ish.
So got a 3.1ghz tripple core now, loving it.
3.1ghz x3, 4gb 1333 bit overkill for a HTPC ? aye.
My unlocked CPU is sort of broken. It took a heck of a lot of effort just to get it to boot into Windows but once there it's generally OK. It's fine in benchmarks etc and basically stable (8 hours prime, IBT, S&M, short bursts of Prime95 and 3DMard at the same time) but I get 3 'corrected hardware error' machine check exception warnings a minute in Event Viewer. It occasionally BSODs on boot but never once in Windows.
After much effort trying to kill the warnings and boot BSODs I've given up. I run dual core for 24/7 usage but fire up ACC for the extra cores and cache when I'm gaming or benchmarking.