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Good Unlockers

paradisiac

paradisiac

paradisiac

Soldato
Joined
22 Mar 2009
Posts
7,754
Location
Cornwall
looking at getting my new Phenom II X2 555 BE tomorrow, and was just wondering (i know its pot luck) but which chips have the greater chance of becoming tri-core and quad-core chips?
 
"it's just luck i'm afraid."

+1

Even within the same batch, some will and some won't. Just make sure you've got a decent cooler/fan if you are lucky and get 1 or 2 more cores working.
 
but surely with the amount of chips out there and the amount of people that will try to unlock them, even though its luck of the draw it should be possible to say 6/10 555 BE will go to 4 core, 7/10 will do tri, 3/10 will not unlock well at all.
 
And what good will the odds do you if you buy one chip based on the odds that there's a better than average chance of being able to get a free core?

If you are serious about getting a good unlocker you would need to buy many chips or pay for a known unlockable chip.

Even then the ability to unlock the cores has been proven to vary between motherboards.

So really, a guaranteed good unlocking chip and motherboard combo isn't likely to save you anything over buying the fully functional chip in the first place.


I took a punt on a Phenom II 555 because it wasn't critical for it to unlock anything and I would be happy with performance even as a dual core.

As it happens it did unlock to a tri-core so there's a freebie for me.
 
im not buying it for the unlocking, i know its a bonus, but just wondered if there were chips that had better success rates than others.
 
As AMD don't officially support/approve of the unlocking, it's unlikely you'll see accurate/official figures. But I'm sure you could get a rough idea from an unofficial AMD/OC forum.

Does it matter anyway? So what if you've got a 58.33% or a 82.17% chance of a particular unlock. Just pray to your favourite god and go for it - you've got nothing to lose.
 
DennisMenace said:
As AMD don't officially support/approve of the unlocking, it's unlikely you'll see accurate/official figures. But I'm sure you could get a rough idea from an unofficial AMD/OC forum.

Does it matter anyway? So what if you've got a 58.33% or a 82.17% chance of a particular unlock. Just pray to your favourite god and go for it - you've got nothing to lose.
Click to expand...

can any harm be done by unlocking cores though? i know people say they run hot but other than that.
also, they say to get a decent overclock stable on unlocked cores you might have to go over the recommended volts, but if there are more cores running, does this mean the voltage is spread more, so therefore its safer.
 
paradisiac said:
can any harm be done by unlocking cores though? i know people say they run hot but other than that.
also, they say to get a decent overclock stable on unlocked cores you might have to go over the recommended volts, but if there are more cores running, does this mean the voltage is spread more, so therefore its safer.
Click to expand...

Generally speaking no harm will come from trying to unlock the cores. In my experience it either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work you *can* try upping the voltage (safe limit on a decent air cooler is around 1.45-1.5v) to see if it can become stable (or work at all).

You will only really harm the chip if you push the voltage too high.

As long as you keep the temperatures in check and the voltage within the safe limits you will be fine.
 
AFAIK, you can't do any harm by unlocking cores.
You can unlock "bad" cores (as opposed to disabled cores) which could stop you from POST/booting properly, in which case you can just lock them up again.
 
DennisMenace said:
AFAIK, you can't do any harm by unlocking cores.
You can unlock "bad" cores (as opposed to disabled cores) which could stop you from POST/booting properly, in which case you can just lock them up again.
Click to expand...

whats the difference between bad and disabled cores?

by no post, do you mean it will be like a bad oc, after so many (think mines 3) no boots it resets the bios to defaults? coz if it wont post then i cant lock the cores surely?
 
paradisiac said:
whats the difference between bad and disabled cores?

by no post, do you mean it will be like a bad oc, after so many (think mines 3) no boots it resets the bios to defaults? coz if it wont post then i cant lock the cores surely?
Click to expand...

A bad core on a "locked" chip is always disabled.

However you many have perfectly usable cores which were disabled on purpose just to get a dual core.

The Phenom II 555 starts off with 4 cores but it wasn't good enough to be a quad core so two cores were locked and it's shipped as a dual core.


And if you unlock a "bad" core what generally happens is windows fails to load and the computer restarts. Or you may get into windows and then start finding stability problems.

Easily fixed, you go back into bios and disable each core in turn til you find out which ones work and which ones are actually bad.
 
Hotwired said:
A bad core on a "locked" chip is always disabled.

However you many have perfectly usable cores which were disabled on purpose just to get a dual core.

The Phenom II 555 starts off with 4 cores but it wasn't good enough to be a quad core so two cores were locked and it's shipped as a dual core.


And if you unlock a "bad" core what generally happens is windows fails to load and the computer restarts. Or you may get into windows and then start finding stability problems.

Easily fixed, you go back into bios and disable each core in turn til you find out which ones work and which ones are actually bad.
Click to expand...

but you might get lucky and not have a bad core? or will there always be a bad one, its just you can control it with a voltage bump?
 
paradisiac said:
but you might get lucky and not have a bad core? or will there always be a bad one, its just you can control it with a voltage bump?
Click to expand...

There is a chance there are no bad cores at all and it was a perfectly good quad core but two cores got locked just because they were short of crap quad cores to make into dual cores.

I can't do anything about the fourth core on my 555, it's genuinely dead but you can find 555s which unlock to a full quad core.
 
I've tried 2 chips so far. An Athlon X2 5000+ AM2+ had ropey cache on one core but still unlocked and, adding a fair bit of voltage, was stable enough for Prime Blend, IBT etc but would get warnings for 'Corrected Hardware Errors' related to cache on one core.

My current Athlon X2 5200+ AM3 unlocked fine on stock volts (1.15 vCore) and overclocked from 2.3GHz to 3.1 GHz also on stock volts. Not sure how high it would go. It's basically limited by my motherboard and RAM combination. Just stability testing at 3.3GHz now. I've had it up to 3.6GHz but it's in no way stable up there (pretty sure it's still platform limited though).

Can't recommend buying an X2 5200+ AM3 for unlocking unless you can check the stepping though. There are some native duals out there (including OCUK stock when it was last checked).
 
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I had a 550BE from OC a year ago that unlocked to quad and it runs happily at 3.6GHz with very little voltage increase. I have to agree with others though it really is pot luck.
 
got my phenom X2 555 today, it seems to be a pretty decent tri-core cpu :) the 4th core fails, which is a tad annoying, but still, so far i have a 3.8GHz tri-core phenom for under £70 :)
 
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