AMD 955 Losing a Core.. Should I be worried.

[Anon-e-mouse]

I've had my 955 Black Edition for a couple years now. Never really had any issues with it.

About 6 months ago the PC was having issues with resuming from Sleep/Standby in that everything would spin up and work, but I would get no screen output, and even re-starting from cold would result in the same thing.

At the time I put this down to Win 7 hibernation issues, as a Google brought up a number of people reporting the same issue.

On Sunday I had to restart the PC after an update. On the startup screen I saw "3 Cores Activated". ie 1 of the cores wasn't.

A couple more restarts and the same situation is happening in that one of the cores isn't 'activated'.

Should I be worried that one (or more) of the other cores are also going to 'die'?

 

[mmj_uk]

Is it overclocked? what PSU?

 

[edscdk]

why would you worry about a 1 in a million chance of loosing 25% CPU power from your £40 cpu?

there is probably a slightly higher chance of another core dieing but its gonna be a tiny chance....

 

[Anon-e-mouse]

It's not overclocked, and the PSU is 550watts.

It wasn't £40 when I originally purchased it.

 

[kingbender]

whats the warranty on these? i think it's 3 years. maybe try it in another board or try to rma it to amd.

 

[Hagar]

I've had my 955 Black Edition for a couple years now. Never really had any issues with it.

About 6 months ago the PC was having issues with resuming from Sleep/Standby in that everything would spin up and work, but I would get no screen output, and even re-starting from cold would result in the same thing.

At the time I put this down to Win 7 hibernation issues, as a Google brought up a number of people reporting the same issue.

On Sunday I had to restart the PC after an update. On the startup screen I saw "3 Cores Activated". ie 1 of the cores wasn't.

A couple more restarts and the same situation is happening in that one of the cores isn't 'activated'.

Should I be worried that one (or more) of the other cores are also going to 'die'?

Was this the windows start up screen or the bios post screen?

What motherboard have you?

normally windows will use all the cores set up in the bios system. Whatever it says in the msconfig.exe /boot/advanced menu, but check that anyway.

I would suspect that one core has been disabled in bios or maybe not found (due to it being defective).

You could try reenabling all cores, cleaning and reseating the heatsink with new paste.

 

[Anon-e-mouse]

Was this the windows start up screen or the bios post screen?

BIOS

What motherboard have you?

ASUS M4A785T-M

normally windows will use all the cores set up in the bios system. Whatever it says in the msconfig.exe /boot/advanced menu, but check that anyway.

Windows is reporting 3 Cores now.

I would suspect that one core has been disabled in bios or maybe not found (due to it being defective).

It's more likely to be the later, but I'll check that out when I go home tonight.

You could try reenabling all cores, cleaning and reseating the heatsink with new paste.

I really don't think it's an overheating issue, as the highest temp I've ever seen reported is about 60C.

 

[JonSmith]

60C is close to the maximum operating temperature of the chips (62C), I don't believe even the stock HSF lets them get that hot. You're going to need to reseat the heatsink and try re-enabling the core. It could be that heat damage has occurred to the chip and you may want to try bumping up the vcore slightly to compensate (AFTER you solve the cooling problem).

 

[mmj_uk]

I would update the BIOS to latest and then reset it, that should rule out bios bug/corruption.

 

[Anon-e-mouse]

I would update the BIOS to latest and then reset it, that should rule out bios bug/corruption.

Turns out mmj_uk was correct, on investigating the BIOS, it seems the option for CPU cores had changed from Auto to Manual, and that one of the cores was disabled.

Flicking back to Auto, turned the core back on. Been running for a while with no issues.