Keep your fingers crossed and you might be able to turn your dual-core or triple-core AMD Phenom II CPU into a quad-core one.
Core unlocking is one of the
hottest topics these days. The
AMD Phenom II X2 and X3
CPUs are made from quad-core silicon
wafers that didn’t make it to quad-core
Phenom II CPUs due to minor defects.
As a measure to minimise wastage, AMD
disables the defective cores and uses the
remainder to manufacture dual-core and
triple-core chips. So Phenom II X2 CPUs
have two disabled cores and Phenom
II X3 CPUs have one. Core unlocking issimply enabling the disabled cores to get
a quad-core CPU.
You have to be lucky to be able to
successfully unlock the cores and have
a fully functional CPU. If the cores have
a minor defect, you might be successful
or else you might end up with the
Blue Screen of Death on reboot. But
nevertheless, it’s worth trying your luck.
First of all, you need a motherboard
that supports the core unlocking feature.
Most of the latest motherboards have
this feature present as an option in the
BIOS or as a button. We installed the
AMD Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition
on the Asus Crosshair IV Formula
motherboard. On powering up the rig
with the Core Unlocker button pressed,
only one extra core got activated.
Next, we tried the manual method. We
activated the Core Unlocker option from
the BIOS and manually activated all
the cores. It worked like magic. No BlueScreen of Death and all our benchmarks
ran without any hiccup at default clock
speed of 3.3 GHz. That’s as good as
the high-end AMD Phenom II X4 965,
which costs Rs 9,500, for almost half
the price. With two extra cores unlocked,
CPU-Z reported the model of the CPU as
Phenom II X4 B60.
Next, we tried overclocking the CPU.
Being a Black Edition model, the Phenom
II X2 560 features an unlocked multiplier,
which makes overclocking hassle-free.
Unlike CPUs with a fi xed multiplier, here
you need not raise the bus speed and
keep an eye on the memory speed. It’s
as simple as bumping the multiplier
beyond the default value. We raised the
CPU ratio from 16.5 to 20 and our CPU
was running happily at 4.0 GHz on air
cooling.
Best of luck!
