Core Unlock Fail?

Hi,
A few weeks ago I built a new rig (as per sig) and unlocked the 555 B.E proccessor to quad core.
Ran a stability test for about 8 hours and all seemed fine.
Then I overclocked it to 4.0GHz and ran some more stress tests and after some adjustments I got it stable.

This seemed to only last about 4 weeks until I noticed the PC was getting slow to load services (avast etc) and I had some graphic distortion (Google Chrome- Red dots, Adobe -similar but more pronounced).
Then not long after it simply won't load the services at all and gets stuck in limbo upon start up.
I've tried adjusting everything from more v.core,more HT,stock speeds,3 core unlock etc to no avail.
Dual core works perfect,I'm running 4.1GHz stable on the dual at the minute with no problems.
So I'm guessing its the unlocked cores,did they fail outright or is there a way to salvage the other two cores?

Just if I can't I'm going to upgrade to a quad or hex for gaming. I know not many games used hex cores but a while ago the same could be said for quad so I'd rather get something that is somewhat future proof.

Thanks
Dan

The experience you describe is not uncommon for those who have unlocked cores: Great at first but deterioration with time. AMD sometimes locks perfectly good cores for marketing reasons at times but for functional reasons more often, or so I expect. What seems to happen sometimes is that the out of spec locked cores draw too much power and overtime that does damage and renders them unstable again.

trents said:

The experience you describe is not uncommon for those who have unlocked cores: Great at first but deterioration with time. AMD sometimes locks perfectly good cores for marketing reasons at times but for functional reasons more often, or so I expect. What seems to happen sometimes is that the out of spec locked cores draw too much power and overtime that does damage and renders them unstable again.

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Thanks,appreciate the reply.
Guess I'll just wait for bulldozer to see how they run and if there not worth it I'll look at the 1100T.

Seen a report that they could be released at Complex,so hopefully its true
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-...psets-to-Launch-at-Computex-2011-197629.shtml

Thanks again

dan_ep82 said:

This seemed to only last about 4 weeks until I noticed the PC was getting slow to load services (avast etc) and I had some graphic distortion (Google Chrome- Red dots, Adobe -similar but more pronounced).
Then not long after it simply won't load the services at all and gets stuck in limbo upon start up.

Click to expand...

That may be a PSU issue. Especially if you get colored stuff on the screen and just sits there.
It's possible your PSU is made of random Chinese crap.

RJARRRPCGP said:

That may be a PSU issue. Especially if you get colored stuff on the screen and just sits there.
It's possible your PSU is made of random Chinese crap.

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Thats possible,I done the stupid thing and went for a higher watt modular psu over a decent 600w.

Its only temporary though,I'll have to upgrade it to run the two 6870's anyhow so maybe I'll see then