Monday, February 23rd 2009
Phenom II X3 Can be Unlocked to Phenom II X4?
It is a well-known fact that AMD has been carving out triple-core and dual-core Phenom/Phenom II series processors out of complete Agena/Deneb dice with one or two cores disabled. In a fresh revelation, a Korean enthusiast claims to have discovered that it is rather easy to unlock the disabled core on Phenom II X3 processors, provided the motherboard supports the Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) feature that is meant to enhance overclocking using AMD's Overdrive software. The enthusiast claims the soft-mod to have worked in his/her case, where a Phenom II X3 710 was paired with a Biostar TA790GX 128M motherboard. The CPU was overclocked to 3.12 GHz, with a vCore setting of 1.37 V.
The method employed: Set the appropriate BIOS setting for the Advanced Clock Calibration feature to "Auto", save settings and restart. The system will be able to deal with the disabled core, and off load some work to it. The processor with the "additional" core was tested to be Prime95 stable and was able to boost 3DMark06 CPU score by as much as 1,000 points. Let the screenshots below speak for themselves:
The method:
The Result:
Sources:Playwares, VR-Zone
The method employed: Set the appropriate BIOS setting for the Advanced Clock Calibration feature to "Auto", save settings and restart. The system will be able to deal with the disabled core, and off load some work to it. The processor with the "additional" core was tested to be Prime95 stable and was able to boost 3DMark06 CPU score by as much as 1,000 points. Let the screenshots below speak for themselves:
The method:
99 Comments on Phenom II X3 Can be Unlocked to Phenom II X4?
And to the Korean guy :toast:
That's cool.
EDIT: I watched all the videos, and couldn't not notice that it said "X3" and showed 4 cores..
I think this is the real deal.
hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1396240
btw- there may be nothing wrong with the 4th core. Maybe it just didn't pass QC (as they clock these up to 3.6Ghz on 1.5V on routine tests).
And it is much cheaper. If you unlock a 720BE, it essentially becomes a 920BE, which is about $50 more(for a standard 920, not a BE).
And you aren't wasting money, worst case is that it doesn't work, and then you still get what you paid for.
And the $119 for a 710 vs the $190 for a 920 is a pretty huge difference in price. Now your saying, "the 710 wouldn't be a 920!!!". Ok your right it would be a 910 because it runs at 2.6Ghz compared to 2.8Ghz. I compare it to that because you can't call it the 8x0 because it has more cache/
So in the end, thats why you would do it, and no matter how slow that extra core runs at, it is free. And anything free is good (or at least better than paying money for the samething). :rockout:
on my 940, disabled, was default
it does funny stuff when it is on my 940 even w/ the asus m3a79t-dlx new bios 0703...