Hardware AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition CPU

That's because unlocking is not guaranteed by any means. Our own 550 doesn't unlock, in fact, very few do compared to tri-cores from what I've read.

The 550 will overclock several hundred MHz faster than your 7750: almost 4GHz is very impressive for a 550, and it supports DDR3, however what did you need to be notably faster?

Plus, where does 955/920 fit into this argument?

 

That is just such a dumb attitude....

4Ghz dual core, and hes moaning it didnt unlock to a Quad Core.....

 

Hate to bring this up but you made a mistake, You said the PII 550 has 8MB of L3 Cache when it has 6MB like all the other Phenom II's (ex the 800 series of course)

 

Unlocking the cores does not just depend on the chip but on your motherboard. The rate of chips which will be successfully unlocked will increase. Why? Because the first triple cores were the rejected duds from four core dies that didn't fully work.

As the manufacturing has improved there are less duds.

AMD does not make enough bad chips to meet demand for the tri-cores. So they are disabling perfectly good cores and shipping them as tri and dual cores.

The earlier you bought the chip the less likely to be able to unlock. Nowadays the chances are quite high you can although it is NO SURE PROMISE as duds still go in the mix.

Crazy B