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Some help unlocking cores on a phenom II

dfk789

dfk789

dfk789

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Joined
31 Oct 2009
Posts
8
Hi there

Recently got a AMD Phenom II X2 550 and a Gigabyte GA-M720-US3 Motherboard. Reading about a bit I found out that I could 'potentially' unlock the disabled cores, by a secret nvidia menu in the bios settings. Being curious and having some knowledge of computers I decided to give this a try. Didn't quite work out and I almost **** myself. Got it all working again by loading fail-safe defaults. So all was good.

What I am asking is if anyone has experience with doing this could give me advice on what to do, what to expect so I don't have another accident. Any dangers of messing about with this? How do I tell if it has worked or not, etc.

For reference when I tried it, I selected the auto setting which put 2% load on each core, when windows tried to boot, it would just hang on a black screen.

Can provide more info if needed, just ask. Thanks in advance. And if I am in the completely wrong place for this, please direct me appropriately.
 
Not all X2s can unlock to X4s. If you got the X2 recently then theres a high chance that it will unlock, but if you got it a while back then the results could be random. It could be that you have a chip with two actual bad cores.
 
Hey, thanks for the reply. I am aware of that, I used potentially in the original post :). But yeah, I literally got this thing less than a week ago.
 
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Hey, thanks. Video has proved informative. Opens up a few more questions for me though, the mobo I'm using needs the F5 bios for AM3 cpus, which I of course have and flashed the mobo with. The guy in the video mentions using a different bios that gigabyte has taken off of their website. Need to find out if that is the case for my mobo.

Main difference between my bios and the one in the video is the option "ec firmware selection", I do not have that and can therefore not set it to hybrid.
 
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dfk789 said:
Hey, thanks. Video has proved informative. Opens up a few more questions for me though, the mobo I'm using needs the F5 bios for AM3 cpus, which I of course have and flashed the mobo with. The guy in the video mentions using a different bios that gigabyte has taken off of their website. Need to find out if that is the case for my mobo.

Main difference between my bios and the one in the video is the option "ec firmware selection", I do not have that and can therefore not set it to hybrid.
Click to expand...

Google will help
 
Yeah, I've been looking. So far all I can see is foreign sites (asia) which google isn't doing a bad job of translating. Search terms so far being something like "ec firmware selection m720 us3". Not been able to dig up much information yet, though I'm still looking :)
 
Hm, thanks for the link. Seems to go against to what I've read elsewhere though.
On this review site the reviewer said he can unlock an X3 - http://www.trustedreviews.com/motherboards/review/2009/04/16/Gigabyte-GA-M720-US3/p2

One of the comments mentioning unlocking an x2 on the rev4 bios, will give that a go a bit later, maybe tomorrow. And also mentions that I should increase the voltage to 1.4 and switching on nvcc? Not sure what that is. Also is there anything bad about changing voltage? Would that break/mess with my system in anyway?
 
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1. DO NOT go looking for that BIOS on the Youtube video.......its for a different Motherboard than yours.


2. I have a 550 and the same MOBO as yours, and ANY BIOS after F3 will unlock the cores on a 550...because i have done it.


How long did you give it when rebooting after first trying to unlock the cores?....when i unlocked mine, i had a black screen for about a minute or so while the MOBO 'did its thing'....then restarted.
 
Hm, I didn't give it too long. Will let it have a bit more time. Can I ask if you have the ec firmware option in your bios. Mine does not seem to have that. If you do what bios version are you using?

In regards to number 1, I didn't mean look for that specific bios, but if there was something similar for my mobo.
 
No i dont have that option, and it isnt available on any BIOS version with the 720 US3,

its not really needed, as long as the extra cores arent broken.
 
Ok, cool. So I just gave it a go, set on auto, save changes. Mobo does it's thing for a few seconds and eventually reboots. OS selection menu

xp - hangs on a black screen
Win 7 - Hangs at the very start of loading windows

Gave them a few minutes each.
When loading the fail safe on the bios I had to do it twice, the first time I did it hung on booting the os as well. Will try a bit more tomorrow with it. Finish early, so should be plenty of time :)

Very helpful someone having the same hardware and having done it, thanks :)
 
Hey, i have 3 good cores and one faulty because when i unlock all my cores and run prime i get an error on one of the cores and it stops being tested for some reason, is there anyway to unlock one core and have a tri core and lock the bad one out?
I am using this MOBO: Asus M4A785TD-V EVO
 
I've got a Phenom II X2 545 and Asus M4A785TD-V EVO Mobo and when i reboot it after changing the bios settings CPU-Z still only shows 2 cores. Does this mean i've failed or they are faulty?


EDIT: Scrap that i forgot to turn on unleashing. Just booted up with 4 cores showing :D Running prime now.
 
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