Engineering sample??

[labass]

ok, so i bought a retail amd athlon ii x3 450 rana from newegg.com. i had it on an asus motherboard with stock hsf. i tried the core unlock and didnt like the temps it was running at so disabled it. well that mobo died and i had to get a new one on a cheap budget so i got a zotac 760g. when the previous mobo died, it also took the cpu fan with it, so i bought an aftermarket one. well since the aftermarket cooler ran the cpu so much cooler i unlocked the 4th core again with the zotac board. it worked fine all day yesterday, even took prime 95 no problems. i came home today and noticed that my cpu was at 1.6ghz in cpuz and that it was at 1.56v. after trying all kinds of things to clock it back to atleast 3.2 i notice that it is saying engineering sample 1.6ghz. it says this under system, under cpuz, in bios...also, in bios, it says i can clock it up to 5.5ghz, but im not going to try that on just an air cooler, but i did atleast try to get it up to 3.2 as a quad core and then i was going to test it. when i did this and the pc booted, i opened cpuz and it was jumping around everywhere...the multiplier, speed, and voltage would jump up and down making the cpu speed anywhere from 1.6 ghz to 3.2 ghz and it says its a phenom ii 00 or something like that...i re-locked the 4th core for now and it is back to a 450 rana....so, should i unlock the 4th core and try overclocking? or does this mean the 4th core isnt stable? what is an engineering sample? Sorry about the long message, i just try to be thorough lol.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Reading the chip as an engineering sample means that CPU-z doesn't recognize it as any retail model with the current settings. Based on your description, I would guess that the 4th core is not entirely stable. Rather try to overclock your 3 existing cores and see if that gives you sufficient performance.

 

[labass]

thanks for the reply, i am happy with it as is, but who doesnt wanna get an extra core for free lol. However, as you stated, its obviously not stable so ill just try to OC for a little extra performance, thank you.

 

[Herr_Koos]

Cool, glad to help.

 

[labass]

Best answer selected by labass.