I am looking into buying a 550 BE because it only costs $70 on newegg right now, and I have been reading that you can unlock it to make a B50 x4 processor that equivalent to a 965 BE. Has anybody here had experience with unlocking the extra 2 cores or know how to do it? Also I heard you need a certain chipset in order to do it. Would this mobo have the right chipset and bios to do so? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157323
You will be better of with a AMD Athlon II X4 645 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor if you whant a $70 cpu or just buy the phenom ii x4 965.
Some phenoms that did not perform well had core's disabled some you can unlock and some you can not but even if you can unlock them thay are 9 times out of 10 unstable with them unlocked.
They go through a process of 'binning' thay start off as quad cores and then some have disabled cores depending on how well thay perform but some of them where made as 2 core chip's and there is nuthing to 'unlock' its a gamble.
Basically a phenom II x2 550 is a very low binned phenom II x4, and as such is not stable using all four cores. Instead of not using these low binned proccessors, they were instead locked doen to a lower core count, in this case, 2, in order to mantain stability. To be honest to have a motherboard with a core unlocker will usually cost more. You're better off getting something like a phenom II x4 965 black edition and a slightly lower end motherboard because this way you will not be using a low binned potentially unstable chip. Furthermore as greenleaf stated you might not be able to unlock every core and still have a stable sytem