It just depends how careful/lucky you are. Some people have better luck by putting the chip in a plastic bag in the freezer for about 1 hr before trying to remove the case. The metal pins shrink more than the plastic case making it easies to remove the case. To see the core ya got to remove the heatplate, which is held on by clips, then remove the thermal goop, and the speed of the core is obvious. BUT, the core speed is not normally the limiting factor in the Athlon it's the speed of the cache chips. Some fast cores are matched with slower cache at a given speed.