Phenom II x3 740BE unlocked, cache hierarchy errors.

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stop!theradio

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
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Alright so I've been running it with the 4th core unlocked without issue since October 13th. I have it overclocked to 3.4ghz. I've done increments of 3 hours at a time with Prime95 without fail. (I know some of you will say that's not good enough, though that's a different issue). I game quite a bit (Fallout New Vegas, GRID, some Far Cry 2), and though CPU usage is high when I game, it runs just fine without issue.

My point it this - my machine is absolutely stable for anything and everything I need it to do. Photoshop mainly, Premier and Media Encoder occasionally, gaming often, etc. The thing is, I decided to go to the event viewer and check out some things, and I see a constant stream of "A corrected hardware error has occurred - cache hierarchy error - error reported by: CPU core - Core ID: 2." This error is reported pretty much every few seconds, but I have no issues at all. I know it's because I have the 4th core unlocked - I locked it back up to stock and sure enough, the "error" is no longer there. But when I unlock the core again, the error is back in the event viewer, but the computer runs just as stable as ever, with zero issues aside from this reported error.

is this something to worry about? Or is it Windows simply being confused about reported core count versus detected cores and cache allocations? It seems to me since it says "corrected hardware error" that it fixes the issue without difficulty. Any info would be good, thanks!
 
While I can't say I know for sure, it sounds like your system MIGHT be doing work on the defective core, it screwing up somewhere in that core, the error is detected and then the system reworks the same information on a seperate core and completes the operation. If thats the case, then your actually slowing your system down cause its having to double back to correct mistakes that core is making....again, im no hardware master guru...just a guess.

Maybe try and do some benchmarks with the core enabled and then with it disabled...see if there is a difference.
 
thats what it soudns like.....your core isnt defective but the cache is........try doing what USMCGrunt suggested(testing w/ and w/o the core enabled, comparing scores), to find out if that is the case
 
Alright I'll have to get some hard benchmarks done. I know the Windows Experience Index thing isn't much of a real benchmarking tool - but if it helps at all - with the 4th core disabled the CPU score is 6.9. But when the 4th core is enabled, the CPU score is 7.4. So for that to happen, I'm guessing performance has got to be at least a bit better, right?
 
the only reason to look at WEI is to see if you can run windows 7.......its a horribly flawed test.....do some WPrime, Cinebench, and 3DMark Vantage(if you can)
 
Go to the Processes tab in Task Manager. Open something that eats a fair amount of cpu. Right click that process and go to "Set Affinity" - set the affinity to the core with the error, and see how that process performs. I regularly go back and forth between two work machines - one with a 955 quad, and the other with a 740 triple, both set to 3.5. I can't tell any performance difference between the two personally.
 
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