Trip Core but Crap MB

I just got a PC put together today, and I'm thrilled with everything but the motherboard. I'm sure I'll get over it, however, maybe with a bit of help from you.

I have a Elitegroup IC780M-A2 (V 1.0A) MB. I'm also rocking an AMD Athlon II X3 445. According to CPU-Z, the revision on this is BL-C3.

All I want to do is see if there is a 4th unlockable core, or an L3 cache, that sort of thing. But my MB comes with some sort of MB II Intelligent BIOS tool for overclocking that seems to allow me to raise the clockrate, but I'm not sure how this translates to unlocking a 4th core.

Looks like I should have gone with ACC, but that's probably too late now. Anyone have experience with this motherboard or BIOS and can help?

Your basic mistake was buying an ECS board period.

Possibly true. I'm happy enough with it running stock, and if that's all I get that's all I need. But I'm sure the CPU can perform a bit better, and I'm curious to know about unlocking the 4th core to see if it's stable. I'm sure the MB supports at least attempting this, I'd just need a nudge to figure out what settings to tinker with.

It has the SB710 so it might be able to unlock the cores. Some boards have a distinct "core unlocking" feature and that should be in the manual. Other than that ACC can unlock cores ...

I don't think this thing has ACC, but there is a whole BIOS section dedicated to OC. MIB II MB Intelligent Bios has the OC tools.

There is memory configuration with DRAM Frequency, Command Rate, Timing, and Bank settings for Interleaving. Then the rest has:

Auto Detect DIMM/PCI CIK
HT Frequency
CPU/HT Reference Clock (Mhz)

And a few other options. Seems like a decent set of tools, but nothing that's simply referred to as ACC (which would be nice).

I had an IC780M-A2. Overall, it was a pretty decent board, and I never had issues with it. Being an AM3 board, you're not likely to find an ACC feature - this feature was (when it was conceived) only pertinent to advanced timing of the AM2+ (Phenom X3/X4) CPUs, where stability at high clock speeds was a challenge. Since AM3 motherboards don't need to worry about compatibility with these CPUs, you always find it labeled as a "Core unlocking" function or some such. The IC780M-A2 has no such function. The SB710 has the ability to do this, but it's nothing ECS decided to implement in a $45-$50 motherboard.

As a side note, I did get a stable 3.6GHz out of an X2 550BE with that board, since it did have multiplier control for some unknown reason, but only with the 2 good cores. The board wasn't half bad for the $50 I paid, actually. But it's not an enthusiast tweaking board, and is even totally devoid of any voltage control whatsoever.