I know its not guaranteed, I figured I may as well try my luck at unlocking either a 550 or a 720. Im building a computer for my brothers birthday and require some semi decent internals. It cant cost the earth as I have been made redundant so I figured instead of pushing the boat out with either an e8400 or a q8300 (as I cannot seem to find a q6600 anywhere) I would go AMD and try to either get a 550 unlocked or the 720. The 550 isnt much slower than the e8400 when it comes to games so I figured this would probably be the better choice. I have recently won an A7DA-s 3.0 and have this with an athlon 2 240 but due to how slow this is due to poor overclocking performance on the MB and the fact 2gb of ddr3 were on par in price with 4gb of pc6400 I thought I would sell them and opt for a phenom 2 (550 or 720) and a motherboard to match that has the potential to unlock any extra performance via either superior overclocking features or core unlocking or a mixture of both. Andy
Why do you need to unlock cores? The 550 will eat the E7400 with the right chipset anyway, save yourself some money and effort overclock the 550, if your set on a quad core the 9950 can be picked up for under £100 now... and an AM2+ gaming drivetrain (RAM+Mobo+CPU) would cost under £200 in total for a decent set up add on a £100 HD4870 and bang your in win street... AMD For The Win!
Im working on a budget, a 550 or a 720 overclock beautifully and out perform most dual core core 2 duos. So I will be settling on one of these chips however you seem to be missing my point. I want a board that could "potentially" unlock cores so I get something for nothing as it were. If the board doesnt unlock the cores then its no biggie but having the facility to do so is what I require just incase I have a lucky chip. Andy
No worries, response wasnt supposed to sound sarky lol. I just havnt been too clear I suppose. Thanks for the help though Andy
EDITED my earlier post: Asrock, Asus and Gigabyte do on some recent models. They require ACC (SB710/SB750 southbridge) and a compatible BIOS.
