MOTHERBOARD: 785gm-e65 processor: AMD Athlon II X3 435 Rana 2.9GHz TL;DR: how do i test temp with the core temps disabled, is amd overdrive good for a stress test or is something better? ok first things first! when i changed the bios setting "CPU active core control" (not yet changeing the "core activation" setting ) i saved and exited bios, my monitor then went black and eventually went to sleep because it wasnt getting any signal. i didnt want to just turn the computer off, so i waited like 5 minutes, but with it not doing anything i eventually turned it off. when i turned it back on the monitor still got no signal and again nothing happened. (i was s#itting bricks at this point lol) so i took the side off my tower, and seen the blue off switch on my PSU and decided to switch it off then back on. after that i tried my computer and it turned on with out a hitch...wtf happened??? (i dont know what i planned to do with my panel off the tower lol) ok anyways, so after that little scare i restarted into bios and turned on the 4th core. i only booted up long enough to ensure that the core indeed was enabled, then i booted back down and disabled it. so now that i know i can do it, i have a few questions, and concerns i know i need to monitor their temps, and i have amd overdrive that i can watch the temps that dont get disabled. but i dont know what is what, its showing me 4 diff temps besides the CPU ones, which sit at about 23C. they are labeled TMPIN1,2,3, and 4 and the temps are (in that same order and give or take) 37, 128(which never changes), 29, -293.4 (all temps are gived at idle speed) also what is an unsafe temp? i also know i need to run a stress test on it, is amd overdrive ok or is there something better? and what is the diff between a cpu test and an fpu test? do i run both? do i test all cores or just the 4th? and for how long? any other info you think i should know is aprecaiated, thanks!
If you enabled the 4th core you should do a stress test on the whole CPU. AMD disabled the 4th core though due to it not passing quality control, so you never know whether you can successfully enable it or not (it could technically actually be any of the 4 cores on the chip). Some people are really lucky and get one which is faulty only to the extent of not being able to overclock too high, whereas others simply won't work properly even at stock speeds. The stress tests may not even pick up any faults, you really need to test every transistor in the CPU and cache, which is hard to do even with a stress tester. If you used the latest x264 video encoder, maxed out all the settings, it can be a better stress tester than the normal cpu testers, as some have reported crashes with that due to the overclock) yes it passing more than 12 hours using the normal stress testers. Its really something like that you have to consider.