Unlocking Athlon II x3 4th core

[person66]

Hi, I just built my first PC, installed windows 7 (64-bit) on it, and everything appears to be running fine.
I have an MSI 770T-C45 and an AMD Athlon II x3 425 and I thought I would try to unlock the 4th core
I Updated the BIOS (8.60), enabled core unlocking, set ACC to auto, and rebooted back in to the BIOS, where it now showed that I have 4 cores, all were enabled. Now when I reboot back in to windows 7 it freezes at the loading screen (with the glowing orbs). When I disable the 4th core, everything works fine. I guess I cant use the 4th core, or is there something else I have to do?


Also, one other question, In my BIOS the CPU temperature reads between 30 and 40, bit in siw it says all the cores are around 25? Is that normal?

 

[rededed1976]

Hi, sorry but it seems that you have one of the Athlon x3's that genuinely does only work on 3 cores. AMD disable the 4th core when it proves defective and sell it as a x3 core. Unlucky but then again you only expected 3 cores... Why not over clock instead?

 

[simon12]

+1 to both the above as for the temp one is the CPU sensor on the motherboard the other is the core temp.

 

[person66]

Thanks for the reply's, I've overclocked the cpu, but if I go past 3.3 GHz the core speed appears to drop down to 1022 MHz (according to cpu-z), any Idea why this happens?
The core voltage also appears to drop past 3.3 GHz, even if I manually set it to something.

EDIT: it looks like it is because the multiplier drops down to 4.0 for some odd reason?

 

[person66]

Best answer selected by person66.