Got a Phenom 720 BE, unlocked 4th core have some Questions.

[Truhls]

Well i just got a 720 BE like i said, i also just unlocked the 4th core and ran prime95 overnight and everything seemed peachy, no errors after 12h. One of the cores was slightly slower but i was streaming TV shows while i did this and some people said that could cause the discrepancy. BUT i was wondering, i saw a few comments like this

" They all have 4 cores whith one laser etched out. This core sometimes can be enabled without causing any lasting problems but this is rare. 99% of all 720s can NOT be turned into quadcores and the time of availability of those that could has ended as AMD has taken action. "

This was posted on 4/5/2009. Was i really lucky or do i not actually have a 4th core, or did something change? Just getting a lot of conflicting info not sure what to trust.

 

[welshmousepk]

who gave that statement? was it AMD?

ive never heard that before, i have an unlocked 550 and it works fine. i think thats just something AMD have said to discourage unlocking. they dont like people getting free cores.

 

[Upendra09]

press ctrl alt del

and go to task manager --> Performance then see if there are 4 graphs under the CPU usage history

if so then you have successfully unlocked a fourth core

when did you get this CPU? if it was recent then you might have gotten an old CPU from newegg or wherever you got it from

 

[JDFan]

Not sure where that quote came from but I can tell you there are chips out there that work fine with the 4th core enabled - I have one that I purchased from Newegg the 2nd week of DEC. and it has been running with the 4th core unlocked since 3 or 4 days after I got it at 3.0Ghz. (did not try any more of an OC due to the stock Heatsink not being very good) - the truth is that AMD will at times disable perfectly good cores if there are not enough defective core chips to fulfill the demand for the chip and it seems that in getting ready for the holiday season they did just that (figure the longer they manufacture the quad chips the better the process becomes and the fewer manufactuering defects they encounter -couple that with the demand for these chips and there is a good chance they do not have enough defective core chips to fufill the supply and they would rather disable a good core and make the sale than have a shortage of supply.

EDIT : Screenshot of a couple Benchmarks of the system :

 

[Truhls]

Well i got that quote from a thread started on here lol, other people said the same thing too and yeah there is 4 graphs so it seems to be working quite fine but after reading those i got a little worried you know?

I Literally got this CPU from newegg less then 2 weeks ago so i may be pretty lucky hehe 😀

 

[amdfangirl]

No, it's still quite a common occurrence.

As long as we have extra cores, there is a chance they can be disabled.

Particularly if they happen to be AMD's.

Some mobos have special marketing features just for enabling the cores.

 

[Truhls]

So after seeing JDfans pic i decided to do my own benchmark and downloaded 3dmark vantage and well, how do you know if you got a good score or not?

My 8600 kills the score it looks like as i have no updated that yet, still waiting on fermi to hopefully drop prices down so i can get a good deal.

 

[JDFan]

Your CPU scores look good (in fact I need to take a look at mine and see why my cpu test 2 ran so poorly (might be the fact I have only 2GB of Ram installed right now) - so the fourth core is running fine but yea the video card is really killing the overall score

EDIT : Ahhh - Just realized the CPU test 2 is the Physics performance which heavily favors Nvidia's 8xxx and above products over ATI so that explains the variance !! And for test 1 mine is a bit higher than yours due to the small OC i have (using a 15x multiplier instead of the sock x14)

 

[Truhls]

Your CPU scores look good (in fact I need to take a look at mine and see why my cpu test 2 ran so poorly (might be the fact I have only 2GB of Ram installed right now) - so the fourth core is running fine but yea the video card is really killing the overall score

EDIT : Ahhh - Just realized the CPU test 2 is the Physics performance which heavily favors Nvidia's 8xxx and above products over ATI so that explains the variance !!

Ah i was looking at that and was like..." is his 4th core dead and he doesnt know it? or my score messed up? " lol.

 

[Truhls]

Best answer selected by Truhls.