$300.00 mobo - cpu - memory suggestions

[Altered]

What are the odds of a phenom II x2 550 BE to be unlocked without any issues? It is to be used on a GIGABYTE GA-MA790GPT-UD3H AM3

I would also be grateful to hear of any memory recommendations that would give good performance ocing on air and stable on the board mentioned above.

What I am looking for is a motherboard CPU and memory I can get for under $300.00 OCing is fine but I need it to have some decent on-board graphics. It will be used for some gaming until the guy can afford a pcie card. Its for a friend that is looking to get a little better stuff but is limited on funds. He came up with the x2 550 and this GIGABYTE board and believes there is easily a 70% chance he can unlock all 4 cores. I am not up on AMD chips so I felt you guys were much more qualified to answer.

[[Ion]]

Looks like a very good setup so far. Personally, I would go for the Athlon II X4 620 because I like having quads, but for gaming the L3 cache would make more of a difference than the extra cores. I would probably get this memory, it gets good reviews and it's reasonably cheap. If he can stretch his budget $7, he can pick up the tri-core Phenom II X3 720, and a 3rd core could be useful for gaming (2 cores for the game, a 3rd core for background tasks)

[Altered]

Yeah I was thinking along the same lines on the 720 he is guaranteed 3 cores fully functional. But he believes there is a 70% success rate on the 550 on unlocking the other 2 cores. To me that sounds a little too confident that both will function as they should.

[[Ion]]

Agreed, 70% seems far higher than others have reported, I would say maybe 40-50%
The X3 is 300mhz slower, but at least then you are guaranteed 3 cores, and there's a significantly higher chance of getting one extra core working than 2, and it should OC easily to 3.4ghz on the stock cooler.