Does your AMD Phenom 2 have hidden cores?
 

apparently a fair few have. Sometimes if a quad core cpu has a bad core the offending core and sometimes another core can be disabled leaving potential for one of the cores to be good. Its also known for good quad core chips to sell with cores disabled to meet market demand.


Last year in October Asus released firmware updates for numorous boards which allowed the unlocking of these cores and there have been success stories
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardwar...re-unlocking/1

Now however this abilty has been shut down but Asus has on its newer boards installed a hardware switch which can do the job the same

http://www.overclockersclub.com/news/26171/

I would be interested if anyone here has any of the boards listed in the first link with uptodate bios actually has any disabled cores ( I am not saying enable them as it could lead to instability but you can just disable them again after) or if anyone actually has any of the new boards with the new switch and 890GX chipset.

Apparently there have even been some quad core cpus that unlock to 6 cores

Re: Does your AMD Phenom 2 have hidden cores?
 

I have seen somewhere that people have bought the x3 cpu's and found that they can unlock the 4th core and overclock and have had no issue's with them.

I think it's just the luck of the draw if you get one that has a good locked core, it's just that it didn't meet with AMD's standards, i have even seen somewhere can't remember now but a overclocking team took a x3 cpu unlocked the 4th core, and overclocked it to nearly 6ghz.

Re: Does your AMD Phenom 2 have hidden cores?
 

I wouldn't be surprised. I cannot remember all those Intel numbers and what exactly each one stood for but they used to sell CPUs with failed maths co-processors as legit x86 chips (i486DX sold as i486SX I think).

Re: Does your AMD Phenom 2 have hidden cores?
 

Makes sense really. They've spent the money to create the CPU, so junking it because one part that isn't strictly needed for the main operation of the CPU isn't working would just be wasting that money.

Of course, now, there is also the added environmental consideration.

Re: Does your AMD Phenom 2 have hidden cores?
 

I've got an AMD Phenom II X2 550 3.10GHz running on a Shuttle XPC Glamour SN78SH7 (with Shuttle's own motherboard). I don't think that it's the right type of motherboard for me to find out if I have a 3rd core.