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AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition

Nice, but what cooling? Also... that was bordering on 2v. I doubt the chip will last till the end of the year. Still, that answers my question pretty much, thanks.
 
It's got to be sub zero cooling of some sort, but yeah looks like they unlock too, might be early days yet though maybe more will come to light?
 
If you get the right combibation of processer and motherboard i would go gigabyte as they have more success first time you have a winner and very good system as i have had mine up to 3.8 so far.
 
I ordered one of these, and looking forward to receiving it in the next few days, replacing my Sempron LE1250.
One question though, what are the chances of unlocking the 550 on a budget Biostar MCP6P M2+ motherboard?:(
 
chippy08 said:
Asus seem to have less chance of unlocking them from what i have seen from results.
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Surely it depends on the CPU not the motherboard? As long as the motherboard actually has the ability to do it it's up to what the CPU cores were binned as to decide the rest. Binned as dead then you probably won't even post. Binned as failed then you probably won't get very far. Binned as bad and you'll crash under a stress test. Only if it was binned as good do you stand a chance at getting a stable quad or tri.
 
Superewza said:
Surely it depends on the CPU not the motherboard? As long as the motherboard actually has the ability to do it it's up to what the CPU cores were binned as to decide the rest. Binned as dead then you probably won't even post. Binned as failed then you probably won't get very far. Binned as bad and you'll crash under a stress test. Only if it was binned as good do you stand a chance at getting a stable quad or tri.
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I would say its down to both be lucky with the cpu you get no bad cores and the right motherboard and its all good stuff but gigabyte boards seem to work better or should i say have had more luck with them from what i have seen it.
 
The luck you need with the CPU, not with the motherboard. The motherboard i selected has the ability to unlock, so i thought i would give this a try. I'm not buying the motherboard just because it can unlock, it's got a lot of rather good features. Nice design, good bios features, funky heatsink, dedicated graphics chip and Asus Express Gate.
 
Phenom II 550 unlock successful, only just! Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P AM3 motherboard, 8GB generic DDR3.
Sorry I didn't look at the code on the core to see what it was before I put on the heatsink & TIM.

I say "only just" successful because whilst it would boot into Windows, it would BSOD occasionally. I finally tracked this down to the 2 extra cores having difficulty running at the various P-states up to 3.1Ghz with the stock voltages of this chip, so I was able to rectify this with K10Stat and now it's completely stable with C&Q enabled too - and I haven't even started to overclock it yet :D

Woohoo 6.2Ghz increase before overclocking not bad for a £70 CPU eh!!! Best value CPU ever :D
 
I'm using the stock AMD cooler. I don't know if it's a specific "dual-core" rated cooler, or whether AMD ship the same one with their "real" quads too. Anyway it's not very good as you can imagine, but it's fine for stock speeds even when unlocked (4 x 3.1Ghz). I wouldn't fancy pushing my chip much past 3.4 with this though.
 
I have the same motherboard and it works for me.
Make sure you have the latest bios from their website, and then when you boot up go to bios and you will see you have I think EC option in the tweaks part of the bios, enable that. I then set all four cores to on rather than rely on the auto setting. That was all I needed to do and for me it worked.
 
melbourne720 said:
I moved from F2c to F3, now it will post with the 4 cores, but not boot into windows :(

Kinda getting the feeling this CPU isn't meant to be a quad...
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The issue with crashing that some people have is that the stock speed of 3.1Ghz is a bit high for such a low binned part. This is why 720BE owners have even more success, 1 less core to unlock and a lower stock speed of 2.8Ghz makes it less likely to crash.
Turn off C&Q, and you can up the voltage by a variable amount and it should let you in to Windows and be stable then.
I needed no extra voltage with C&Q disabled, but did need quite a bit of extra volts in the first 3 P-states with C&Q enabled to keep it stable.

Failing that, you are very unlucky - the majority of people unlock it with no problems at all. You could sell it for only a small loss and buy another one, one guy in this thread bought 3 of them with 2 out of 3 working great :)
 
[ESRA]Taf;14698097 said:
The issue with crashing that some people have is that the stock speed of 3.1Ghz is a bit high for such a low binned part. This is why 720BE owners have even more success, 1 less core to unlock and a lower stock speed of 2.8Ghz makes it less likely to crash.
Turn off C&Q, and you can up the voltage by a variable amount and it should let you in to Windows and be stable then.
I needed no extra voltage with C&Q disabled, but did need quite a bit of extra volts in the first 3 P-states with C&Q enabled to keep it stable.

Failing that, you are very unlucky - the majority of people unlock it with no problems at all. You could sell it for only a small loss and buy another one, one guy in this thread bought 3 of them with 2 out of 3 working great :)
Click to expand...

how much more of a voltage to the cpu do you need? I tried up to +0.1v and it still didnt work for me :(
 
lauy said:
how much more of a voltage to the cpu do you need? I tried up to +0.1v and it still didnt work for me :(
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Varies greatly per chip... Note that I'm talking about C&Q enabled in the paragraph below, since I have to pay the electricity bill! With C&Q disabled there is only 1 voltage to change, and it should be easy to bump up the stock 1.35v in the BIOS right up to 1.55 in increments to find the stable voltage (if there is one). If you've only tried an extra 0.1v so far, then give her some more juice! You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain as long as you don't go over 1.55v :D You could also try UNDERclocking it, if the extra 2 cores really are low-binned then they may prefer running at 720BE speeds (2.8Ghz).

If you have C&Q disabled, ignore the below. Only read if you want to unlock and/or overclock with C&Q enabled.
Anyway I needed a very large increase of around 0.25 extra volts in P-State 3 (800Mhz), which makes it almost the same voltage as P-State 2 (1900Mhz). So I bumped up 1 and 2 by a lesser amount, 0.1v I think. I bumped up the top P-State 0 (3.1Ghz) voltage by just 0.5v at the moment to 1.40v, although I will probably set it back to stock 1.35v soon because all of my BSOD's happened (past tense! :D) like overnight when it was idling in P-State 3 (800Mhz).
Note that you can't change the voltage of individual P-States in the BIOS, you need a special utility like K10Stat. Most BIOSes only allow you to increase the voltage in all 4 P-States by the same amount, not much use if your crashes are only caused by P-State 3 for example.
 
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