So, got round to flashing my bios tonight (with some expert help from Unicorn, props ) and have FINALLY done what I've been talking about for months and unlocked the two dormant cores on my Phenom II X2 Quite a few problems flashing the bios, Uni had to create a Win98 USB boot disk in the end (if you're watching MSI, M-Flash does NOT work) but after that it's as simple as changing two bios settings and rebooting. On quite a high right now and I have a feeling you guys will appreciate this more than my girlfriend so WOOOOOO! Pics or it didn't happen: I realise I was quite stupid in not taking a before pic, doubters will be treated to a box shot
Takes slightly longer than 3 mins to order, ship, receive and install a new CPU. Not to mention the extra cost. If you're going to post, find something relevant to say. Stain. Seriously, your humour is lost on me. Do you really need to substitute the word "know" for "no", for christ sake have some respect for the queens, reminds me of my 12 year old niece texting me. Congrats October, nice one!
Lucky git My triple-core phenom 2 won't unlock the 4th core under any circumstances (or even POST with the 4th core unlocked for that matter, requiring a BIOS reset and a cold boot of the PSU to fix), and that includes attempting clocking the chip at 2ghz with a hefty voltage boost, seems i got one of the chips with a genuinely faulty 4th core
Sometimes they're disabled for pure marketing reasons yield on quads too good? If you can make more money by selling some as 2/3core versions without undermining the quad sales it makes business sense to do so. Meaning some of the 2/3core chips are actually perfectly capable quads (though sadly not mine )
It's the same thing they are doing with their graphics cards, at the start their short on parts so they cannibalize other products to have the parts, their tri, and dual core releases for instance have defective and perfectly fine quad core chips intermixed, some just to beef up stock or because the original wasn't selling as well as hoped. This translates over to their graphics cards in a way with the 5970 currently contributing to the shortage of 5870's for instance because it uses the same parts and its simpler to have some which use 5870 retail parts then to build all new parts from scratch and have just a name and no product until their built. Half of selling is just the marketing, and while you might make s*** shine you can't sell the shine with no s***.
Doesn't make sense. Why would you sell a chip that cost you 50$ to make (let's say), for 70$ when you can sell it for 100$ (all cores enabled), and that you can sell the broken ones that technically goes at the garbage, fixed up, at 50$? It's cheaper to make a dual core CPU.. so they can just do a dual core using the same mold (have the system do the circuits for 2 out 4 CPU's.. so CPU 3 and 4 has no circuit what's so ever... this is not the case, as you were able to unable them.. so it's broken) It's usually a bad batch of CPU. if your CPU is not affected , then you are lucky, you are never (not yet anyways) using the damaged circuit of the CPU. It could be an error correction circuit that is not working properly (your CPU is packed with them), voltage reduction during auto-down-clock (AMD's Cool&Quiet), that is not acting correctly on these CPU's (ie: fails to reduce voltage.. so waits energy), 64-bit new operation code broken, system stability reduced (usually for processors targeted home 98% stability is a pass, maybe this CPU is 97% or lower). And many other factors that is extremely hard to test, without special equipment.
because not everyone is willing to buy the 100$ cpu. 20$ profit off a sale is > than 0$ profit from a high-end cpu sitting on your metaphorical store shelf. in addition, it will be obsolete in 8-12 months. so you have to sell it quick to make profit.
This is what amd does when they get wafers and cut the dies out they all dont work so when they get enough the will release the dies under another series and disable what isn't stable for them AMD instead of throwing it in the trash. not all will be stable some slip through and will allow you to unlock the cores in Phenom II X2 and X3 and athlon X4's on select MOBO's ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI A athon X4 is a phenom II with the L3 disabled
AMD's line up at the moment is getting pretty reminiscent of the AthlonXP days when the yields were so high that pretty much every chip they sold passed the AthlonXP 3000+ test but ended u getting sold as all the other Barton cores. Nice work October on the unlock.
You're so freakin pedantic it annoys me. And you're also wrong. Stop trolling. As has already been said, not all of them. Some quads get the cores locked and get sold as duals to meet the demand of supply, which for the past 12 months, has been very high. If the unlocked cores were actually broken, I very much doubt that the system would have worked at all following the procedure let alone work flawlessly and pass a brief Prime95 test. I don't mean to sound sarcastic here but you are simply wrong in much of what you have said. Companies regularly use locking techniques on microchips to meet a high demand or even to save money. Creating a whole new die and manufacturing a completely different chip is obviously more expensive than producing more of the same chip on one die and locking the cores to make it a different CPU. Octobers CPU is a fully fledged, 100% performing quad core Phenom X4. This may be the first one that I've unlocked but I can guarantee it won't be the last, and I am not new to the concept of chip blocking. Memory manufacturers do it all the time on memory chips. I remember those days, have some great memories of working with Athlon XP chips. I became quite proficcient at unlocking and overvolting Barton chips (pre week 32 from meory?) before Athlon 64 came along
Reinstalling a Fenrir does NOT equal < 3 minutes Gonna do a full all night Prime tonight just to make sure everything's hunky dory. Gotta love AMD's manufacturing standards As Uni said, and given cyrilthefish's experiences, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be typing this right now if I had one of chips with true faulty cores. One extremely satisfied customer
Early chips yes, later chips no. Maybe some are still made that way but as the manufacturing process ages, the failures decrease. Still the occasional one will slip through but nearly all athlon II X4's are made that way.
