Phenom II 550 to Athlon x3 450

[Guest]

Hi,

First time poster, long time reader however i wasn't able to find an answer to my problem here or anywhere else for that matter.

So, I have a Phenom II 550 BE that I wasn't able to unlock to 4 cores. But with the latest bios version - f5b - I was able to select which extra core to have enabled or disabled. So it was proven that Core 2 was bad but I was able to get it running as Athlon x3 550. Is there a downside to that? Any extra 'danger' compared to having it unlocked to a 4 core proc?
The reason I am asking this is because I wasn't really able to find any info about Athlon x3 550, there was only one reference about it on google and nothing relevant to my questions.

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/6748/dsals.jpgw

Cheers

 

[moody89]

I can't see there being any danger myself, providing your system is stable. You could try running a Prime95 stress test to check this.

 

[Guest]

Oh yea, ran Prime 95 for about 7 hours for starters and it was all good, CPU temp ~61 degrees so my guess would be 7-8 degrees more for the cores (that being with stock cooler). But other than eventual stability issues I guess it's all good than for now.

 

[Raidur]

It won't be any more 'dangerous' than having both unlocked. Your only real danger should be stability, I haven't heard of anyone ruining their chips by unlocking cores.

If your prime95 stable i'd say game on.