Unlocked Phenom 560 BE - Issues with core number 4

[rinleezwins]

Hello people, I have managed to unlock this CPU to B60 quad core a very long time ago and it's stable at 3.9ghz, 1.5v with a mugen scythe cooler. However I have noticed something lately that has been stealing my performance in games and I never realised that before. In pretty much every game, the 4th core has max load while the other cores are at around 50-60% load and this makes me lose around 20 FPS in pretty much all games. Of course the easy way to go around it is to adjust affinity using task manager and disable the process from using core number 4 and everything works fine, but having to do that manually gets annoying after a while.

So basically, my issue is: Games perform better when running on cores 1-3, rather than 1-4. I would like to know if there are any folks out there with unlocked Phenoms that may have heard of this issue or may have an idea about what is causing it. My theory is, that the system and other programs load the 4th core heavily and that's why that core gets maxed out, but shouldn't games even out the load and take some load off this affected core? I am pretty confused as to what is happening.

 

[Wisecracker]

You wouldn't embellish those differences, would you? 😀

3 cores (instead of 4) sharing the 6MB of L3 Cache can provide a small boost in some instances -- but nothing like what you are reporting.

Nice chip ... I hope your problems are not symptoms of a pending demise.

 

[rinleezwins]

You wouldn't embellish those differences, would you? 😀

3 cores (instead of 4) sharing the 6MB of L3 Cache can provide a small boost in some instances -- but nothing like what you are reporting.

Nice chip ... I hope your problems are not symptoms of a pending demise.

Sadly, I am not embellishing. I took some screenshots right now. Example game: Heroes & Generals(FPS In top right corner)

Cores 1-4: http://i.imgur.com/Ay2KvcF.jpg
Cores 1-3: http://i.imgur.com/A5AaNV9.jpg

Another game, Path of Exile(Look at the Framerate graph):

Cores 1-4: http://i.imgur.com/wGDssP7.png
On cores 1-3, it runs smoothly at stable 60 FPS with V-Sync on(I messed up the screenshots and cannot be arsed to go back in and retake it, but I have no reasons to lie).

It feels like Core 4 is bottlenecking my entire system. Also, when I am not in a game and all I have running is the browser and some programs, core 4 is always the one with the highest load.

 

[Wisecracker]

Disable the core?

Maybe there is a reason the chip was binned as a dual-core 4+ years ago.