Weird 550 BE Unlock Result-Help Appreciated

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superkdogg

Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2004
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I got my 550 BE and MA770T-UD3P the other day and went to work on it last night. It came with Bios F4, and I later flashed to F3 but that didn't change the results.

Here's the weird thing- With no unlock, everything is just fine-decent OC, nothing unusual. When I unlock, POST page shows the x4 B50 and everything until loading windows goes smooth. Windows (i'm on 7) loads up and at first glance it looks ok too, but the desktop widgets have weird graphical corruption of color and/or shape. Any game I tried to load looked horrible with flickering and misrendering, but never froze up, crashed or caused a BSOD or reboot.

That's the weird part for me-I've never seen a failed/failing CPU that allowed a system to fully function with some degredation-I've only seen CPU's that cause BSOD/reboot, app crashing and outright dead systems.

There's a little more to it:

I don't have any proof of this, but the situation just 'feels' like a Windows issue. I will unlock and boot a portable Linux DVD tonight to check further.

The other fact is that I was lazy last night and just pulled the HDD from my existing rig, which was a P55 based Intel CPU machine. Windows 7 was surprisingly flexible and able to stand up to the abuse----as long as I'm only running 2 cores; 4 cores is the only place with trouble.

What do you guys think? Is there something I'm not thinking of?

If Linux works ok, I'm going to do the reinstall of Windows and I'll know for sure but in the meantime any suggestions would be great because I'd really like to have the quad core goodness.

One more quick point- the 4 core issue happens regardless of voltages, and I took HT speed and clockspeed way down too-none of it made a difference positive or negative.
 
could be windows or 1 of the 4 cores are only bad.. but yeah usually if one or 2 of the unlocked cores are bad it will just bsod.. so its possible they work but they are insanely unstable but windows is still able to boot up..
 
So nobody else has seen anything like this?

I actually kind of like that, because nobody else probably tried keeping the same installation of Windows while swapping motherboards and CPU brands, so maybe the reinstall will fix it.

It's just so weird seeing all the rendering anomalies and no real system instability-it acts like a graphics driver issue except for the fact that it's directly tied to whether or not I have all the cores running....fun problem.

Lemme know if you have any ideas
 
UPDATE:

I guess I'm gonna have to call it a fail. I get the exact same sort of graphical anomalies on Knoppix with the 4 cores enabled, regardless of clockspeed and voltages.

I'll just have to settle for a $100 dual core doing 3.9 GHz on stock cooling--couldn't win the cores, but it's not a bad OC'er.
 
I have exactly the same problem. Another side-effect is that the Windows update also fails - C80003FA error message. The system somehow thinks that the Windows 7 installation is not genuine. Simply going back to 2 cores alone fixed everything. Over-clocking alone can also cause the Windows update to fail, so I started dialing back the CPU multiplier. There is a point though at which I'd rather have a stable 2 cores running at 3100 than 4 unstable cores running at less than 2000.

I will say that the Gigabyte hybrid BIOS made it really easy to unlock the cores. I'd really like to see if anyone has been successful in stably unlocking more cores.
 
definatly a bad core(s) ..... atleast you could crack yours open, i cant get mine to budge at all , thoguh it does OC well....ive had mine a 3.7, 3.78 windows didnt like :(.....good luck with overclocking it further.
 
Only Phenom II i've done on my board was my X4 955 BE, but I do know that in alot of cases AMD sells faulty X4 processors as X3, and maybe they've done the same with the X2. Have you tried manually enabling three of the four cores, instead of all four? A tri-core experience should prove slightly better than a dual-core =)

Just my two cents - it sounds like it OC's decently so if you get it to work stable as a Tri-Core you should be in pretty good shape!

P.S. - I have seen some motherboards allow you to select which cores are enabled and disabled, but never had experience with the board you're using so sorry if this feature isn't available for your system =(
 
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