AMD’s Phenom II series covers a pretty extensive market and to make manufacturing easier AMD uses its quad-core Phenom II architecture for triple and dual-core processors as well. The extra cores are deactivated, but can be reactivated through some simple BIOS settings found with several motherboards. This is a trick we have reported on at numerous occasions in the past but at OCinside.de they have taken things one step further.
They have managed to make their test processor Phenom II X3 710 into an engineering sample, through a couple of BIOS settings. This not only resulted in four active cores but also unlocked multipliers, and at the same time they got access to a whole lot more voltage settings than when the system recognized the processor as Phenom II X3 710.
They used the, in these circumstances, well known AM3 motherboard ASRock A790GXH/128M and managed to trick the board into reading the processor as an engineering sample by playing around with the ACC and BSP settings in BIOS.
Alas, it was not successful at every boot and every time they had to reboot the same steps had to be taken in the BIOS to make sure you get an unlocked processor.
It at least shows that you can unlock more power from AMD’s Phenom II X3 processors and perhaps you can use this to create a permanent mod, which would render AMD’s Black Edition superfluous.
Do note that not all Phenom II X3 processors have functioning cores so the results will vary with each processor.
:: AMD Phenom II CPU multiplier unlock, Vcore unlock and fourth core unlocking.
