1st gen AMD Phenom X4 9600 acts up

[neffeps]

Good evening or whatever time you read this...
Recently I've acquired a quad core AMD Phenom X4 9600 for virtually no money. I went ahead, put in my ASUS M2N-E motherboard and began testing. Unfortunately, the CPU is extremely unstable - sometimes it doesn't POST, sometimes it works fine for 5 minutes then locks up, sometimes it throws up BSODs with different codes. I've already checked my RAM with Memtest and it worked fine, the motherboard is also probably OK, as it works fine with both an older Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a newer Athlon II X4 640, and the same thing happens on a different board (a Gigabyte board with nForce 6100). I've noticed underclocking the chip makes it a little bit better, but still far from perfect. What could be wrong on it (out of curiosity, as I don't think there's a way to fix a CPU :v)?

PC Specs
ASUS M2N-E motherboard with 5001 latest BIOS / Gigabyte M61 whatever it's an older nForce board with AM2+ support
4GB Kingston DDR2-800
AMD Phenom X4 9600 / Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / Athlon II X4 640
Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 1GB
Windows 7 Professional x64

 

[sLowEnd]

1st gen Phenoms ending in "00" instead of "50" are B2 stepping and have a TLB bug. The BIOS may have a setting for the workaround which disables the L3 cache. Give it a try if you haven't already.

 

[damric]

That board supports some Phenom IIs.

What I'm not sure of is the Southbridge chipset on that mobo and whether or not it supports ACC. If it does, I'd get a Phenom II 555 (like $5 in ebay) and unlock it to x4.

Or get like Phenom II 945 (about $15).

Looks like the BIOS doesn't support the fastest x4s or any of the x6s.

 

[neffeps]

1st gen Phenoms ending in "00" instead of "50" are B2 stepping and have a TLB bug. The BIOS may have a setting for the workaround which disables the L3 cache. Give it a try if you haven't already.

Thanks, I'll investigate if something like this shows up in the BIOS.

That board supports some Phenom IIs.

What I'm not sure of is the Southbridge chipset on that mobo and whether or not it supports ACC. If it does, I'd get a Phenom II 555 (like $5 in ebay) and unlock it to x4.

Or get like Phenom II 945 (about $15).

Looks like the BIOS doesn't support the fastest x4s or any of the x6s.

If it doesn't work I don't really care, I have faster CPUs for this board anyway. I was just wondering if I could have an upgrade laying around if any AM2+ stuff comes around from recycling.

 

[Bones]

1st gen Phenoms ending in "00" instead of "50" are B2 stepping and have a TLB bug. The BIOS may have a setting for the workaround which disables the L3 cache. Give it a try if you haven't already.

This issue isn't due to the bug, the TLB bug didn't have this kind of effect(s) on systems with it.

It's sounding like more of a bad chip problem and TBH, it's not unlikely due to the age of these chips. Doesn't help they were known to run hot anyway, said chips like any other can be affected by excessive temps over time and over a decade has passed since it was made, that's plenty of time for it to develop such issues while it was being used.

I'd mess with it a bit but at the same time I'd not waste alot of time with it, you can always find another and if it's not a board/RAM problem, that should take care of it.