So, my roommate is upgrading, which means I'm going to be taking his mobo, cpu, and mem off of him that he has currently. The system is from ibuypower. He has a phenom II x2 550 be. however, when doing research on the cpu it says its an AM3. however the board is only an am2+? so, a couple of questions. Is the only difference between am3 and am2+, is that am3 supports ddr3? did amd release 2 different versions of the same cpu? now to the topic. im getting this for a super good deal. im wanting to see if i can unlock to 4 or 3 cores. i know this isnt guaranteed, but what board would be a good one to go with? by that, i mean, the one that is the most likely to work to unlock the cores? again, i realize this isnt a guarantee, but i figure its worth a shot. also, are there any am2+ boards that support the right chipsets, so that i wouldnt have to get new memory? thanks in advance and as always, have a good one!
Yogurt
I'm not knowledgeable when it comes to AM2+ as I have only been running AMD since AM3, but, the biggest difference is that the AM3 platform fully adopts DDr3. Newer AMD CPUs have both a DDr2 and DDr3 memory controller built into the CPU. (Remember, memory controller is part of the CPU now.) Therefore a newer CPu can run in an older board, but some older CPUs cannot run in a newer board.
To your original question. Many 555 BEs will unlock to 3 and even 4 cores...you need the mobo to do it though. Chances are whatever mobo is in his old ibuywhatthehellever isn't capable of this. Can't be positive, but probably not.
To have a chance at unlocking the CPU to more cores you will most likely need a newer motherboard. Some AM2+ boards do it, some AM3 boards will do it. It varies mobo to mobo.
If you could find out exactly what mobo you look to be inheriting I could help out more...but my initial thoughts are you will need a new one.
What is this unlocking all about? Boards that support a chip don't automatically use all the cores?
Not if the CPu is labeled (sold) as a lesser model. It gets complicated, but at times AMD will sell a quad core CPU as a dual core or triple core CPU...sometimes it is because of a defective core. Sometimes it is because of demand and they would rather sell an x4 as an x2 instead of selling nothing at all.
For instance I have a 555 BE, I got lucky, mine will unlock to a quad core...making it basically a 955 BE. Some will unlock all 4 cores, some only 3, some are what they are X2s. (FYI, I have yet to see a 555 BE that didn't unlock to x3, most new ones will go x4.) I would refer you to this link for some learning.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=661708
Lots of knowledge dropped in that thread.
someone correct me if im wrong here. seems that when amd and intel produce chips, they do it on a mass level. say 10,000 chips. some of the chips, are stable at a certain speed. so lets say, they want to produce a 3.2ghz quad core, but the chip isnt stable, they might just turn off a couple of cores and lower the speed. wham! now they a 2.8ghz dual core. not all of the cores they lock are broken or unstable. they just dont meet the needs of what they wanted the end result to be.
Yogurt
PS- its more about getting more potential out of a chip then anything. only certain boards with the correct southbridge(i think) and i think its called ACC, are able to unlock the "disabled" cores.
More or less. In the early runs of the Deneb architecture some speculate that x4s with a "broken" or "weak" core were sold as x3, or even x2. Later on after the fabrication process got better there weren't as many "broken" CPUs coming off the lines...however the demand for triple and dual core processors was still very high. So, AMD will turn off a core or two to meet the demand...even though there might be nothing wrong with said core.
Again, read the above link I posted...I go more into depth there. As with anything overclcoking, it is a crap shoot. You buy a dual core, you might get a dual core...or you might get a quad.
