HELP_Trying to unlock and overclock my Phenom II 550 NON BE.

Hi there gooday layds and gents,

Firstly i would like to welcome myself to the forum as i am NEWB. Brief intro.

Nationallity: South African, Cape Town
Age: 21
Hobbies: Love anything to do with PC's

Okay so what this thread is actually about, was to ask a few questions on how to mainly to overclock or get my Phenom II X2 550 stable(Note: Its not a BE) on my Asus M4A785TD V EVo mobo. So i was able to unlock the two dourment cores on the cpu and make it a quad core, CPU Z shows for and so does task manager, it to boots into windows with now problems and system runs, this still running at stock speeds which is 3.1Ghz.
But as soon as I run Prime for about 5mins, it switches off...which im guessing that its not stable ofcourse.
So now my question is how do i get it to be stable with all 4 cores running, or is this because one core could be defective, or should i bump up the CPU Voltage to have it run stable? Note that the only time my PC switches off is when i Prime it, and when i turn it back on i get BSOD, so i have to revert to stock settings (Dual Core) and then switch on again.

Help needed to get my pc stable as this is my first time at unlocking/overclocking. The overclocking will come later, as soon as i can get my CPU stable at 4 cores.

Thanks in advance.

If you are running your phenom at stock clocks and your unlocked cores keep shutting down, chances are the cores are bad and shut down for that reason. Do both of the unlocked cores shut down or does just one of them?

Nah my PC shuts down as in, it switches off completely and then i have to turn it back on again. I dont know about the cores shutting down though, how do i see that or how do i know if one or two of the cores are bad? I can still play games and my pc wont shut down.

Well, if the PC is shutting down during prime it's going to be kind of hard to see which one is doing it. What I would do is turn on one locked core at a time and run prime. By process of elimination you can determine which core, or both, are causing the reboots.

Thanks budd, i will give that a shot

gnusounduave said:

Well, if the PC is shutting down during prime it's going to be kind of hard to see which one is doing it. What I would do is turn on one locked core at a time and run prime. By process of elimination you can determine which core, or both, are causing the reboots.

Click to expand...

Good advice. Sometimes a little more CPU voltage can stablize those unlocked cores but usually if they aren't stable on stock voltages and frequencies then they are indeed not viable. But it may be only one of the two is not viable.

Okay so ive tryed disabling the 4th core and making it a tri core, it seems to be that the 4th core is defective as i left everything stock on 4 cores and primed it and it switched off. But now with three cores activated/enabled its Priming now say to about 15mins as we speak with an over clock as well of 3.8Ghz from a stock speed of 3.1Ghz running at a qiute cool 32/33 degress, thats what HW monitor says.

Heres a screen shot of what i have at the moment. Liking it so far wanting to go for 4gigs.

Optimus Prym said:

Heres a screen shot of what i have at the moment. Liking it so far wanting to go for 4gigs.

Click to expand...

If you have a liquid cooling system I would high recommend going with 980 or hexacore. The 550 is a weak cpu in terms of performance benchmarking and general throughput. Not to mention it runs 30% hotter than most of the newer Phenom IIs.

For now im going to have to stick to what i got, because pc components in south africa a damn expensive like they over price everything else. So when i got the money again ill buy me an octacore or hexacore.

My CPUZ Validation

You're doing good.

Did you try the fourth core again with more vcore?