Tuesday, August 11th 2009
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Sempron 140 Unlocks to Athlon II X2
It has been done over and over again, and each time new AMD processors successfully unlock disabled cores (dubbed "defective"), it only makes us wonder if it is a deliberate attempt by the company to make buying its cheaper processors potentially rewarding. It has been discovered that AMD's recently announced Sempron 140 single-core processor can be transformed into a dual-core Athlon II X2 series processor with a simple, well-known trick. This comes as no surprise, as the "Sargas" core the processor is based on, is made by disabling one core on the Regor dual-core die.
The trick requires a motherboard with AMD SB710 or SB750 southbridge that supports the Advanced Clock Calibration feature. Not all motherboards, however, support this mod. By simply enabling the feature in the BIOS setup program, the system will be able to address both processor cores, with the complete feature-set of Athlon II X2. The staff behind the feat over at Thai techsite VModTech tested for the unlocked core's stability with much success. At 3.71 GHz (13.5 x 275 MHz @ 1.536 V), the processor stood SuperPi, WPrime, and WinRAR bandwidth tests. Validation can be found here. At around $40, here's the cheapest ticket to a dual-core processor that looks $80 Intel processors in the eye.
Source:
VModTech
The trick requires a motherboard with AMD SB710 or SB750 southbridge that supports the Advanced Clock Calibration feature. Not all motherboards, however, support this mod. By simply enabling the feature in the BIOS setup program, the system will be able to address both processor cores, with the complete feature-set of Athlon II X2. The staff behind the feat over at Thai techsite VModTech tested for the unlocked core's stability with much success. At 3.71 GHz (13.5 x 275 MHz @ 1.536 V), the processor stood SuperPi, WPrime, and WinRAR bandwidth tests. Validation can be found here. At around $40, here's the cheapest ticket to a dual-core processor that looks $80 Intel processors in the eye.
65 Comments on Sempron 140 Unlocks to Athlon II X2
Besides, if they're just defective Regor cores, what the hell else are they gonna do with 'em? Better to make $40 than nothing at all.
i remember trying to browse the internet on a Celeon 1.7GHz, 128Mb ram with Firefox and i coudnt browse the internet on that thing. Firefox worked so slowly that you could take a 3minute brake and than come back and resume browsing. i know that the problem was that the pc had only 128Mb of ram but the pc could even handle browsing the net. that was in 2005 and FF ver 2 if i recall correctlly.
the OS was XP.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698 this chip $40
and this board www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128397 $90
to try to get the same performance as
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103688 this chip for $61
and this board www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130228 $80
$130 for a hope or $141 guaranteed lol my bad the second 2 have combo deal at $136 shipped
AAC wand and we have x2 or x4
if you would you build a pc with this Sempron and put it 512mb ram and then installed Vista on it. you would have the same effect that i saw on that Celeron.
CPU means nothing! its all ram for vista and 7.
i forgot to turn off Vista's indexing function. that would maybe help. but i did turn everything else off. i turned off all the visual effects, also changed the UI to Windows Classic.
Vista index for the pc was 2.6-2.8.
if you leave them be (and leave the system on for a while) it sorts itself out and works fine. How fast it sorts itself out is dependant on the HDD speed.
And for those guys with less than 1GB ram, why in the world you need windows for an internet machine? Just grab a copy of Ubuntu and install it. :respect:
good tip too.
i dindt install BitDefender on than pc as i found it was slowing the pc when more. so i installed Avast instead.
It is the anti-malware program from M$
Vista comes pre-install with it BTW.
Also it will be a great idea to upgrade to SP2.
Sp2 wasnt available in January 2009.
Now the question is just why not get one? :p
And while 512MB might be the cheapest, the difference between 512MB and 1GB is something like $4, so you would be an idiot to build a computer with only 512MB of RAM. I wouldn't do it regardless of what OS I was putting on the system. Hell, I make it a policy to never build a machine with less than 2GB actually... But now you are going on about RAM, in a thread about processors, where you started arguing that single core processors aren't good for people who "multitask" because "Vista and 7 are optimized for dual cores", then you start talking about RAM...
We all know if you stick an idioticly small amount of RAM in a machine, it will perform like crap. That has nothing to do with the topic, and certainly adds nothing to back up your original statements about single core processor being too weak for multi-tasking and modern OSes.
The fact of the matter is that single core processor are still good enough for probably 75% of computer users. Most people surf the internet, check email, use Office, listen to music, sometime rip a CD, burn CDs, watch videos/movies/DVDs and thats about it. And they usually are not doing all that at the same time. None of that, even when done together, requires anything more than a single core processor.
Now would I build a machine using this processor? Under the right circumstances, yes. But it would have to be an extreme budget situation, because with the E1500 only $15 more, and the x2 240 only $20 more, it would be hard not to take a step up to those.