My Athlon II X3 is now a Phenom II X4

[kmac]

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

[Uriel]

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.

[switchmode]

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.

[kmac]

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?

[Sputnik]

I never managed to unlock my 720. What motherboard are you using ?

[switchmode]

"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.

[kmac]

I never managed to unlock my 720. What motherboard are you using ?

Asus M3A78-T

Its an AM2+ Board with the 790GX/SB750 chipset that allows unlocking

[Uriel]

I'm using a Jetway Ha08 Combo - again 790GX/SB750.

[Sputnik]

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?

[zain]

Man these AMDs sound exciting, I really want one over an Intel. Good price/performance!

[Cornholio]

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.

[Uriel]

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.