Due to the peculiarity of the situation, I was having a difficult time with a heading. Whatever the case, here is the situation: I have an amd athlon II x3 445 (3.1ghz) with stock hs/fan I'm using it on an asus m4a785-m I turned on acc and unlocked the fourth core. I can play games, while having open, an absurd amount of firefox windows and tabs, documents etc. No problems. No blue screen of death, ever. I have ran prime95 and some other stability tests, with great success and no overheating. I recently ran an audio conversion utility. It's called freeac. It used to be called bonkenc. All four cores shot to, and stayed at 100% usage. The cpu soon overheated and the computer powered off. I didn't see it coming and at first, didn't realize what happened. Anyhow, I have since changed back to just 3 cores and again used freeac. No overheating problems (not even close), but also, cpu usage never hits 100% for any of the cores. This in it's self is what has me wondering. A little confused, in fact. I did just order a hyper 212 plus, and I think that would stomp out the overheating problem, but I am wondering if there is something wrong- hence the reason for this cpu having the fourth core disabled and being marketed as a tri core. Is it worth the risk to continue use with a better cooler, and ignore the possible problem with having four cores enabled? I would rather play it safe, but don't know if it is safe to use four cores, if things seem stable. Something that makes me wonder if the unlocked fourth core is a bad idea, is that, as far as I know, the athlon II x4 cpu's come with the same hs/fan combo.
Unlocking cores can give you a boost, but since that additional core(s) are disabled for some sort of defect, it's a gamble to enable it. AMD and Intel aren't simply going to disable a perfectly good core they can sell at a higher price. All CPU's based off the same silicon are checked and binned on clock speed and number of fully functional cores. It's a lot better than tossing a quad-core (for example) into the trash when you can recoup the chip as a a tri- or dual-core CPU. It's just good business sense. If someone gets lucky with enabling the core and it works fine for them, great. Just understand core unlocking has the downside of not always working. A better CPU cooler isn't a bad investment, it simply may not fix the trouble caused by enabling a defective core. It's worth a shot, but if it doesn't fix the issue, then, yes, it's time to go disable that core.
