AMD Phenom II 960T only 5 cores? (O_o?)

Hello guys,

I am new to this forum so go easy on me.

Recently, I bought a 960T at a very cheap price ($50) off of [Hard]Forum to replace my overclocked AMD Athlon X3 Rana x3 (overclocked 40% with one unlocked core).

After initial configuration, I was able to unlock the 2 extra cores and run it at 3.8Ghz stable. At first, I stress tested the 960T with SiSoftware Sandra and it told me that everything is stable and that I have 6 cores and 6 threads working albeit it couldn't figure out the AMD processor model, labeling it as "AMD Unknown Model", which I don't really care about as long as I get the performance boost.

That was two weeks ago. Since that time I have played some video games, did some multi-threaded programming, and ran some virtual OSes in the background. No problems.

Today, I decided to stress test it a little more. Downloaded Prime95 and started the stress test. Surprisingly, I am seeing 6 worker threads but only 5 of them are updating. They have currently been running for 2 hours and every test has passed. However, 4th worker thread is just a blank white screen with nothing updating. This is really weird because in Windows Task Manager and Linux are tells me that I have 6 threads and 6 cores. BIOS is telling me that I have 6 cores. Also SiSoft Sandra is telling me 6 cores. CPU-Z is telling me 6 cores. But in Primes95, the 4th thread seems to be dead.

Any ideas on what could be wrong with my system or Primes95? Am I running a 5 core system or a 6 core system?

Thanks for your replies in advance.

Bad core.

OptyTrooper said:

Bad core.

Click to expand...

Well if that is indeed the case as I fear, how is it getting equal performance to the six-core systems on SiSoft Sandra? Sandra is ranking it better in performance to Six-Core Phenom II 1090T (OCed to around 3.6)?

The core isn't completely stable, so it will do some things, but not others.

Guys,

Here is an update. So after hearing that the core might be bad or the CPU is unstable, I went to BIOS and underclocked it 200mHz from 3.8Ghz to 3.6Ghz. Also I increased the VDDA voltage because previously I had not touched it much. I increased the VDDA a good 0.2v.

Now thread 4 is running in Primes95 and all 6 threads are running equally fast.

Also where can I find the best voltage settings for my 960T CPU or do I just have to experiment with viable settings?

Try the higher speed now that you've upped the voltage.

Just check that temps stay where they should.