Processor going from dual to quad back to dual

#1 rfgggg

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Posted 01 April 2011 - 03:32 PM

When i built my computer i bought a AMD Athlon II 7850 dual core black edition...about a week ago my power supply died and i just got a new one yesterday...when i plugged it all in and started it up windows was showing my cpu as a Phenom fx 7850 quad core.....at first i thought it was just windows messing up but after a few benchmarks (and running a few games) i noticed that my performance had also increaded....then i thought it might be a bios setting for my cpu clock going from auto to optimized so i shutdown changed it back to auto and its back to a dual core with it lesser performance....so i restarted again to see if i could get it back and changed the setting back to optimized and nope its still a dual...anyone know if it may have just been windows and my programs messing up along with my imagination or did somthing actually happen to change it?

#2 Suicide King

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Posted 01 April 2011 - 10:40 PM

I have no idea why something like this would happen. It might be reasonable if you had a x3 core Phenom that was showing up as x4. When processors are created, the ones with a single defective core are marked as x3, and the defective core is disabled.

Perhaps, and this is just a guess, your Athlon II Dual Core is actually an Athlon II x4 with two disabled cores after testing -- much like I spoke of the Phenom x3 coming from an x4. Perhaps the cores weren't properly disabled and have somehow reactivated -- and, further, windows has mistakenly labeled it a Phenom?

As to how to fix/change something like this -- I have no idea. I'd contact AMD about it and see what they say.

#3 rfgggg

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Posted 05 April 2011 - 10:46 PM

ok so i was fiddling with my bios settings to see if i could get it again and i did manage to....bios was showing a AMD Phenom FX-7850 Quad-Core Processor (64bit) so it wasnt windows making a mistake....and i was overclocking alittle with my motherboreds built in overclocker and got to 20% with it still working but then at 25% it crashed and had to reset bios and my processor went back to old one.....so i messed with settings more untill i finally got somthing...tough the somthing was weird...it was showing a AMD engineering processor (64bit) at 1.6 ghz.....then messed with settings more and its back to the original one.....i have not managed to get it back...tough next time if i do i will take a picture of my settings so i can remember them though i think its more of a random thing....