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Unlocking Cores

#1

LordRendar

LordRendar

A little technical data upfront:

Mobo: ASRock N68C-S UCC Mainboard Sockel

CPU: AMD Phenom II 4X 960T BE

and using Win 7 64bit

I tried to unlock my cores using the inbuild UCC. After rebooting I saw that my core is actually a 6 core.
But it will either freeze at the Windows starting scene or I get a blue screen a second after it finished loading to desktop.

Any advice is welcome. For the timebeing I shut off UCC and am running on the regular settings.


#2

DarkAudit

DarkAudit

Found this at cpu-world.

And this on the Tom's Hardware forums.

tl;dc version: Just because it can unlock to 6 cores doesn't mean they will work. It's still a decent CPU with 4 cores.


#3

Bowielee

Bowielee

I'm confused. If a chip is a 6 core CPU, why wouldn't all 6 be natively supported?


#4

LordRendar

LordRendar

If I remember correctly AMD was sitting on a lot of 6 cores who werent selling because of the price(?) so they locked 2 cores and sold them as a Quad core.


#5

strawman

strawman

In the chip business you don't produce 20+ versions of one chip in different speeds and cores.

You produce one chip, then you test them and when a chip mostly works except a core or two then you lock the bad cores and sell it as a lower core count chip. When a chip doesn't run at the faster speed, you sell it as a chip for lower speeds.

However, the production line works very hard to lower the error and failure rate, and the market doesn't always buy all the fastest chips, so it may be that 90% of all the chips have operating cores and work at the highest speed, but since they sell more of the lower end chips, they end up marking a lot of great chips at lower core/lower speed simply to sell them.

This means there's a chance that a lower end processor you may have purchased is actually a higher end processor with working cores that can go all the way to the top speed.

There's also a chance that it was one of the processors marked as a lower processor because one or more of the cores is actually bad, or the processor doesn't run reliably at the higher speed.

Being able to unlock the chip doesn't guarantee you got one of the good ones. It's a roll of the dice, really.


#6

PatrThom

PatrThom

What he said.

--Patrick


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