• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

my cpu is now showing only 2 cores

Joined
Apr 8, 2009
Messages
3,016 (0.51/day)
Location
vermont
System Name The wifes worst enemy
Processor i5-9600k
Motherboard Asrock z390 phantom gaming 4
Cooling water
Memory 16gb G.skill ripjaw DDR4 2400 4X4GB 15-15-15-35-2T
Video Card(s) Asrock 5600xt phantom gaming 6gb 14gb/s
Storage crucial M500 120GB SSD, Pny 256GB SSD, seagate 750GB, seagate 2TB HDD, WD blue 1TB 2.5" HDD
Display(s) 27 inch samsung @ 1080p but capable of much more ;)
Case Corsair AIR 540 Cube Mid tower
Audio Device(s) onboard
Power Supply EVGA GQ1000W MODULAR
Mouse generic for now
Keyboard generic for now
Software gotta love steam, origin etc etc
Benchmark Scores http://hwbot.org/user/philbrown_23/
last night was working fine no problem. I get up this morning and its not. hell coretemp sees it as a core i3 havendale, it is a core i7 860 WTF! i have cores enabled all in bios hyperthreading enabled. I have seated and reseated the cpu. WTF! im so angry ever since I went i7 it has been nothing but problems. heres a pic so you can see.

EDIT: we have figured out it is a windows error not hardware related therefore im still tryin to figure it out please read on for help and windows experts PLEASE HELP
 

Attachments

  • wtf.jpg
    wtf.jpg
    139.7 KB · Views: 497
Last edited:
Is it just reading it wrong? Have you tried another program to see if it see it different? If the bios is showing all the cores I would say program error. Maybe a windows glitch?
 
the bios doesnt have an option to show all cores it shows cpu count 1 thats it. cpu-z chows 2 cores 4 threads same as eleet. wprime will not even calculate with 8 threads now. im pissed off tbh. this setup is 1 month old to the day I have never taken it above 1.43v at 4.5ghz.
 
and the socket isnt burnt there are no bent socket pins either. everything is pointing to half my cpu dieing. which I honestly didnt even know was possible
 
CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, Performance tab.
 
DD is right check to see if windows sees all four cores
 
It should show 8. Also, boot up RealTemp and see how many physical cores it shows and their temperatures.
 
real temp will not boot up it just goes to load and does nothing. windows shows 4 threads. was working fine last night no problems whatsoever. it never even shut down overnight it was still on the browser I left it on but only then showed 4 threads so I figured it was turbo mode being stupid. nope. so I rebooted, same thing, shut down pulled out the cpu checked everything over nothing, started up, now it startes showing as core i3 in coretemp, WTF! restarted nothing. all plugs are plugged fined cleared cmos 10 times. im angry its my day off and I get to spend it trouble shooting. and get this, I cannot afford to buy a new cpu, newegg states im over my 30 day and wont replace but im over my 30 day by 6 friggin days! thats horse crap if you ask me. so now im stuck with a half working half not working cpu.
 
Go to the device manager and see what is says. Also, try clearing your CMOS. Pull the battery, don't just use the jumpers.

Another thing is it just might be turboboost. IIRC turboboost does different things given the proper conditions... if all the cores aren't being used, it turns off some of the cores and gives the remaining cores a boost. Try disabling turboboost if you havn't already.
 
Last edited:
its none of these things actuall i figured it out. its windows corruption somehow. I switched disks to my brabd new vista X64 install and it shows all 8 cores. switch back to my win7 X64 install only 4. now my question is how do I get my files i.e. steam files games etc over to my new vista install??
 
Copy the entire file/folder as a bulk with both drives attached...Not the installed stuff just the DL'd files plus copy your Documents

or copy your entire drive to the new one move the files you want and delete the rest
 
well something in the win7 install is corrupt so I dont want to move the corrupt files to the new installation. wtf would cause windows to disable 4 cores??
 
you know what. I had just barely changed it from 8 cores to "auto" like earlier that day I'll go in and change that after my updates finish installing for vista.
 
well now this is getting insane! win7 has completely locked me out! i cannot change the boot settings, and now it says my windows is not genuine and when I go to re-activate and add my product key it refuses to to accept and just shuts it down. in vista I cannot access the hard drive at all it just says explorer has stopped responding! man this is irritating!
 
Sounds like you got a really wicked virus and it si corrupting your Registry, piece by piece. It is time to backup what you can and go for the reinstall since you are already locked out. Otherwise, you want to boot into Safe mode and run your virus scanners, system restore, etc. to try and get the system back in full working order.
 
Sounds like it's time to kill it with fire and start over. Sure, it's a pain in the ass reinstalling all those programs, but it's the only way to be absolutely sure that the scum won't resurface...
 
well I have a full backup from febuary i might run but upon running hdtune on my velociraptor which also happens to be my win7 disk im getting transfer rates uo 44mb/s and minimum 19mb/s sound funny?? yep normally 119mb/s lowest I ever saw was 90mb/s sounds like a disk falure maybe this drive is newer than my system! its a mere 3 weeks old! im not happy
 
Sounds like it's time for a return... hard drives are the most likely component to fail, after all.
 
Sounds like it's time for a return... hard drives are the most likely component to fail, after all.

Actually the motherboard is the most likely component to fail. That is statistical fact. Hard drives are second or third I think. HDD failures are the most annoying and heart breaking.
 
Go to device manager, under the processors drop down uninstall all the processors and see if that fixes it.
 
ha fixed it all of it! had to force the cpu bootup with easy bcd then reboot then switch in msconfig then reboot then re-activate 3 times and change the hdd cable yes it was the cable not the hdd. sonofabiotch! that was aPITA!
 
Actually the motherboard is the most likely component to fail. That is statistical fact.

Really? I would have never guessed... why is that? You'd figure it would be the hard drive, what with the mechanical parts and all... a motherboard has no moving parts, save a socket retention mechanism or a fan...
 
It's got so many different chips from lots of different manufacturers, and by far the most electrical junctions that could fail in some way. It doesn't surprise me too much.
 
Really? I would have never guessed... why is that? You'd figure it would be the hard drive, what with the mechanical parts and all... a motherboard has no moving parts, save a socket retention mechanism or a fan...

Yeah, like DD said. When they do the testing for this stuff any failure of the product is a failure for the whole item. So a mobo with a broken LAN port is considered by manufacturers and parts dealers as a failed mobo. That plus, as DD said, the sheer amount of stuff that is on most mobo increases failure risk.

I will try to find that interview of the company that did the testing. I think keyboards were the least likely to fail followed by CPU's.

Good thing is most stuff on a mobo that fails, can be replaced with devices you can connect to it. Lost the LAN, by a $15 LAN card for the PCI slot. sound chip, dido, etc. Motherboards have the benefit of being one of the only parts in your rig that can partially fail and still be worth using.
 
Back
Top