This one is right up there with the strangest problems I’ve ever seen.

We bought the parts for and built four new machines, each with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 motherboard, Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM. Three of them are working fine. One of them (mine, unfortunately), exhibits a rather odd flaw: Windows Task Manager reports that there are only two CPUs. On the others, it reports four CPUs. Other than that, the computer seems to run just fine.

I tried all the obvious things: re-seating the CPU, reducing the overclocking (back to 2.4 GHz processor from the 2.8 GHz we had it at), and finally swapping the processor with one of the other machines. No dice. The other machine reports four CPUs and mine still reports just two CPUs.

The problem is almost certainly with the motherboard, but I can’t prove that yet. Is it possible that I have four cores all running, and Windows is reporting the wrong thing? We ran CPU-Z, which also reports only two cores, but I don’t know if it’s getting information from the hardware or from Windows.

The really odd thing here is that I’ve never heard of a partial failure like this. That is, if the motherboard was faulty, wouldn’t the dang thing just not work at all?

In any case, I’m looking for a program that I can boot and have it tell me about the CPU: what type, how fast, and how many cores are actually running. Does such a thing exist? I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD, but the tools on that disk don’t support the Core 2 Quad. Nor do they appear to identify how many cores are actually functioning.

If you know of a utility I can download and burn to a bootable CD so that I can test the CPU outside of Windows, I’d really like to hear about it. Leave a comment here on the blog, or drop me mail: jim at mischel.com.