Overclocking and Unlocking

Now the fun part. As mentioned before, Sargas cores exist only on paper and in reality it's a Regor dual core processor, with one logic core disabled by AMD. If you pair Sempron 140 with AMD's SB710/SB750 Southbridge, you can try to unlock the second core and chances are very high you'll be getting an Athlon II X2 processor at a $39 price point.

First, Sempron 140 is overclocked with one core active, the maximum overclock is 3.64 GHz using 1.475 V. After stability has been tested, and all the benchmarks successfully completed, the ACC function in BIOS is set to Auto (Unleashing mode required with Asus boards) and voilà, Sempron magically transforms into Athlon II X2 440 with two fully functional logic cores. Maximum overclock for unlocked Sempron was exactly the same as when locked to one core.

Because the overclocking had to be done via HT Link, memory clock and Northbridge clock also increased to 2160 MHz for NB and 1440 MHz for memory. Below you can see the performance improvements when using overclocked and unlocked/overclocked Sempron. Single core overclocked is marked with green bar, while unlocked Sempron is marked with blue bar.

Resident Evil 5

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Cinebench and Handbrake

System Power Consumption