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?
I will go over it's strong points again real quick for you.
-AMD allows us to clock each core separately
-1 core even running 500mhz will get performance gain
-I love kittens
-The price is significantly lower (despite what you said)
Now here's a real good question for you. Why are you running that 9950 at 3Ghz? It didn't come from AMD like that, so why bother? In your words since it didn't come right from AMD like that, right now you should be taking a performance loss (this is of course in sticking with what you previously said).
Thanks in advance!!
Guys it works and its very stable on my CPU OC'd to 3 GHz and 1.25vcore. Seriously!
They are only going to sell so many high end processors, and the supply is far greater than the demand, so you have to use the supply to fill other demand.
Look at history, it is pretty obvious that this practice is common, even in the CPU industry.
Now see how quickly X3 720 BE sells. You have at your disposal a DDR3-supportive AMD quad with unlocked multipliers.940 is the pin-count for AM3/AM2+/AM2. You've been looking at "package".
Look under "Specification" it will say that its an "X4 20 processor" with my previous BIOS it said "X4 20 Black Edition" which is closer to the truth. The previous BIOS also correctly identified it in the processor name string. But I'm not complaining you understand.
Neo4, since the unlock worked for you, I assume you have an 0904 batch processor. I noticed on my serial number that in the serial after the only character (in my case a 'B'), it lists 904. I was wondering if you notice the same thing on your serial, or if mine is just a coincidence? The serial number is on the box, or if you bought yours OEM, it is the bottom line on the heatspreader. If yours matches too, then there may be a convenient way for people to cherry pick "unlockers" online by simply asking for the serial number. Of course in B&M, one could just look at the manufacturing date through the little window.
i641.photobucket.com/albums/uu131/NEO30000/Phenom_X3_720_BE.jpg