This CPU has a Hidden Core - Let’s Unlock It…

[@michaelthompson9798]

I loved doing the “lead pencil” trick on the good old Athlon /X2 CPUs for overclocking or unlocking hidden cores via bios tweak! The good old days of true pc tweaking!

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah I was reading about that today too! Sounds fun to try

[@craiganderson2362]

lmao this takes me back ,on intels side it was tippex or tape on q6600 cpu's

[@Mini-z1994]

@@RandomGaminginHD Could perhaps experiment with keeping the 4th core locked & see if you can keep the L3 cache enabled & get more stability in the manual mode of cpu core unlocker, i think the board should have that available in the bios somewhere.

[@JikoMuskato]

@@craiganderson2362 Oh yeah, I did that with my Core 2 Quad inside my Optiplex system. Then upgrading the RAM to 8GB, adding a system SSD and a GT 1030 and this thing is now smashing everyday tasks and older games. These days you just shouldn't forget to use Inspectre to remove the Spectre / Meltdown protection in order to get its full speed back.

[@Apexseals87]

Yep, takes me back. I was running a Barton 3200+ and my brother pencil molded his 2800+ to 3000 speeds I believe? I still had ddr ram and he had sdram, so I still had the advantage.

[@zooteddd]

I have a feeling that the gains were more from the l3 cache in gaming rather than the extra core

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah good point

[@gorjy9610]

100%, Athlon II was fine for most things back then but for gaming phenoms were only way to go (at least on AMD side). I bought x3 black edition 7something at that time hoping to get unlockable one but no luck. Still, it was much faster than old a64 5000+ and serve me well.

[@richardgarrett2792]

Not bad TBH. I have an Athlon II X3 460 that is currently sitting in a drawer. 3.4 GHz but no the extra core isn't good. I recall many happy evenings playing Warthunder and World of Warships on it. i do have an X4 620 that has the extra 6 MB of L3 thast works and it is fine up to about 2.85 GHz from 2.6. IIRC $99 BITD. I am using one currently. The X3 425e that runs stock at 2.7 GHz, clocked down to 1.35 as it is a low usage device and power consumption is paramount. The board has 6 SATA ports and a 4 port SATA adapter card for 10 drives. Mostly back ups. some file serving. Meets my needs.

[@burrfoottopknot]

Nvidia are looking at this video and wondering how they can market this CPU as next gen, and add some blurry mess called DLSS to your $2500 gfx card because marketing works

[@darren253]

@@RandomGaminginHD Do you remember the Black Editions from AMD. They were highly sought for overclocking

[@TheJimminiShow]

You are correct sir. If the core did not run at full stability, it was disabled and then sold at a discount that made the gamble worth it. Earliest AMD version of "Silicon Lottery"

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Ah I thought so :)

[@ccoder4953]

That sort of thing is quite common in the silicon business. Chips can be sold as lower models for everything from some part of the chip is just bad, to a bit out of spec in some way that production test can find but the average user will likely never encounter or notice, to "we just need more of this model to meet orders". As a buyer, there's really no way to tell why some higher model was sold as a lower one (we don't include production test data with the parts, after all - not that anybody outside the company would understand most of it anyway). We only guarantee that it will do what we say it will do and that it meets the specs we provide for the chip. If it's better than that, well, good for you. And it's not like the silicon lottery is a new thing or even a CPU thing. You can find it in every part of the chip business, from simple opamps to the most complicated CPUs.

[@user85937]

@@ccoder4953 I'm pretty sure companies like Dell buy all the failed chips, when you have 20 Dells with the same specs, they still all perform wildly differently.

[@rrcoster]

dell h ELL lol@@user85937

[@ccoder4953]

@@user85937 Somebody like Dell is an interesting case. Since they are such a large customer for Intel or AMD, they are going to be more involved with stuff like this than your average customer. So Dell might do something like, we're selling a bunch of office PCs, so we don't really care that much about getting the best performance. Just sell us say some bottom spec or near bottom spec 4 core 11th gen CPU. Well, most of the CPU dies that Intel or AMD makes will not be bottom spec or near bottom spec. They'll probably be somewhere near the middle. What I mean here is that Intel and AMD have a bunch of different SKUs, but only a handful of actually different die. What they likely do is do a preproduction run of a given die and get a statistical distribution of stuff like what voltages and frequencies all the die will run at. Then they set up different SKUs based on their expected yield. Most of the distribution in silicon tend to be Gaussian, so they expect most of their production will be in the middle. But somebody big like Dell will probably get a better deal for buying a bunch of parts near the low end of the distribution because then Intel or AMD can sell those low end chips but they can also downgrade whichever of the more numerous middle distribution parts they happen to get and maybe have plenty of stock on.

[@MonamiTech]

In Korea, it was called RaNeb(Rana + Deneb(Phenom II X4)). Your CPU also has unlocked L3 cache. If the L3 cache is not revived and only the core is unlocked, it is RanaPus(Rana + Propus(Athlon II X4)). Additionally, when Heka(Phenom II X3)'s core was unlocked, it was called HeNeb, and when Callisto(Phenom II X2)'s core was unlocked, it was called CalNeb. To put it further, unlocking the core in Zosma(Phenom II X4T, similar to Deneb) made it ZoBan(Zosma + Thuban(Phenom II X6)). This was insane.

[@homelessEh]

really with they followed through with phenom X8 2420.

[@boktorinator693]

Athlon lore

[@SirReptitious]

I had an Athlon XP-5200 and the asus mobo died. My nephew had the same cpu and mobo and his died too, so clearly a mobo that was made when the engineers were drunk. I was still okay with using a dual core CPU, so I bought a Phenom II X2 and a asrock 970 chipset mobo that allowed unlocking of extra cores. I figured if I got lucky and got a stable 3 or 4 core cpu I would be happy. I did get lucky and got a fully functional Phenom II X4 @ 3.3GHz. CPU-Z says that as a dual core it uses 80w and as a quad core it uses 140w, so I never did any overclocking on it. I was perfectly happy with getting a quad core for a dual core price. It was amazing how much faster it is as a quad core versus a dual core. It feels much more than 2x faster and I don't know why. I just know that if run as a dual core it feels like a snail. This is with 8GB of DDR3-1600. No doubt the luckiest guys were those who bought X4s and were able to unlock them to X6s. Those cpus were giving the first gen of FX cpus(bulldozer) a run for their money since they had 6 fpus to go along with their 6 cpus.

[@vitafinito]

Back in the day when I was building my pc, I bought a x4 960T just for the unlocking core ability not knowing if it's on every cpu or some of them. Turns out it's not possible in all of them but my cpu was capable of unlocking last 2 cores, which made it a 6 core cpu. It was good.

[@nunofernandes4501]

The most fun I had with PC hardware Easter eggs, was back in 2005 when I bought a Geforce 6800 GS and used RivaTuner to unlock it to a 6800 GT. It worked and I got a top of the line card for the price of a mid tier one. Good old days of hacking, tweaking, overclocking... building and gaming PCs was so much fun.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah that sounds cool

[@Novotny72]

did this too

[@manoftherainshorts9075]

I have a 6800 Ultra lying around. Still works BTW

[@nunofernandes4501]

@@manoftherainshorts9075 my 6800 GS stills works too, it's in a P4 3.2 rig with Win XP.

[@superslotheroes7649]

the days when a 8800gtx could be flashed to a quadro

[@Fender178]

I remember some Phenom II X4 CPUs that could be turned into X6's back in the day by unlocking the cores and it was actually stable.

[@RuruFIN]

Worked with the ones which model number ended with a T.

[@tom_foolery]

I did this on an old Gigabyte board that had this capability

[@gabrielv.4358]

@@RuruFIN wow

[@micahottaway8455]

Some of those AM3 CPUs did have an unlockable core. Sometimes it would work with just a bios setting. Sometimes it would show the extra core and be unstable when tested, and sometimes it just wouldn't work. A lot of people got an extra perfectly working core for free. What a time. You just have to try a number of samples.

[@donottouch9110]

Man gaining 6mb of l3 cache without spending an extra 100 dollars was crazy back in the day also I've seen people run at a stable 1.65v on the cpu with a liquid cooler and it is stable you should try it at 1.6v with a water cooler and it does gain allot of stability lucky ones get 1.52 or 1.55 volts which was relatively normal at the time unstable usually means it didn't run at the lower voltage of the x4 variants listed so they were discarded as 3cores but yeah it just need more voltage

[@Irricas]

My Athlon II X3 425 unlocked to a Phenom II X4 B25 with the 4th core and 6MB cache fully working. Been stable for 13 years. 2925 MHz @ v1.375 . Used to be my gaming PC and was passed onto my folks a decade ago. Still works fine :)

[@phero6933]

I had an x555 black edition and was able to unlock it from a 2 core to 4 core and it was the best. I told a buddy of mine to do the same but he wasn't able to unlock it sadly, so I felt bad for suggesting it, but I ran that CPU for nearly a decade.

[@linuxpirate]

Such an insane value at the time. If you got lucky of course.

[@sirtanon1]

I ran the same CPU in my rig for years. Unlocked to a Phenom II B55 and mine even overclocked some. Amazing CPU

[@diegoleiva7242]

That's winning the silicon lottery for sure! Good stuff.

[@darius6112]

I had the same, unlocked to 4 cores and had a stable 3.6ghz OC. Great fun

[@widnawz]

i had a friend who had one of these who got lucky and the extra core was fully functional, the idea was initially due to yields but then it became about product segmentation so some lower binned but fully functional x4's got downed to x3's or even x2's

[@ArikSummers]

love your content man , you keep it simple and humble in an internet full of bs folks lacking that.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Appreciate it, thanks :)

[@NoLongo]

I always thought my Athlon II X2 held its own. Eventually slapping a Phenom II X4 into that OEM system was an amazing upgrade for so cheap. Those VRMs, PSU, and cooler had no idea what they were in for.

[@estebancantero4751]

I still have the AMD Athlon II X3 450 unlocked into a Phenom II X4 B50 and I I used to stream with that (only stream, the game were executed on my main gaming pc, which has an FX 6100 OC to 4.7 GHZ, I live in Argentina, we make out the most of what we have :/, tech prices are crazy here).. And yeah! I could stream fine on 720p 60 FPS.. Now I got my hands into a Phenom II X6 1090T in my streaming pc.. So now that CPU is the main processor of my friend gaming pc, and he stills plays a lot of games with that old Phenom II.. Nice video!! :D

[@revolver265]

I was literally about to type a comment saying "I'd like to send you something" near the end of the video but you actually said how. Perfect! Tri-core CPUs always seemed like a strange proposition, now I see why they bothered to put them out.

[@hardware_maniac]

This video really shows how lucky I was with my phenom ii x3 720 back in the day. It already had 6mb of L3 cash, and I also managed to unlock the 4th core just fine. The cpu was completely stable at 3.2Ghz at 1.3V, I couldn't push it too far because of a very cheap mobo. This chip served me really well paired with 8gb of 1600mhz memory and a r7 260x. My first "gaming" setup from 2014-2018, brings back memories)

[@86FCS]

I also had one! was able to put 3.7Ghz, mine was a little unstable when unlocked

[@Eisspitze]

I have the same processor and tried to unlock it. And I had the same problem with the unstable core. So I deactivated it in BIOS (found out it was core 1 that was defective) and now I had a perfecly stable Phenom II X3 with that juicy L3 cache :D

[@bryndal36]

Back in 2001 I upgraded from a Pentium 166MMX on the Intel platform over to AMD and the Duron 700. The Duron had half the cache of the original Athlons of the time, but if you carefully scraped the silicone off one side of the chip you could expose the other half of the cache and in most cases, doubled the amount of cache on the cpu giving you an Athlon for the price of a duron.

[@CaptainKenway]

My first real gaming build had a Phenom II X3 720 in it. The fourth core unlocked and worked just fine, but it overclocked way worse than the others. At the time, so few games used more than one core (two at most) that it in my case it was better to leave it locked and overclock higher. I later got a quad-core Thuban chip and unlocked that into a full hexa-core, which also overclocked to 4GHz on all cores. All on the same motherboard too between 2009 and 2014, before I finally upgraded to a 4790K.

[@Apathy474]

I had an old phenom 2 x2 when i was a kid for a while. Eventually I wanted to paly guild wars but it was unplayable on a dual core. my dad had previously told me that i could unlock more cores but he never got around to showing me becuase he was too busy. After i cuoldnt' play guild wars I decided to just learn how to do it myself. Unlocked the extra 2 cores and it was astounding how much smoother every game was

[@solocamo3654]

So funny to see this, was about to just sell an X3 setup. Only bought it ages ago for the novelty and the fact that it was an upgrade over the dual core sempron that was in a system I had.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Awesome, I think the sempron might be unlockable too. Could just be the single core ones though

[@solocamo3654]

@@RandomGaminginHD Actually in hindsight, I think it was a single core. Shame I don't have it still to confirm. Pretty sure it was a Sempron 145 though which were single core.

[@youllnevertakemealive2833]

That's a hell of a board - sold a similar variant (M5A78L-M+USB3?) way too recently, took an Athlon X2 to an FX 8350, rock solid no matter what I asked of it. AM2-3 was such a great platform, thanks for taking me back.

[@natemasterson7274]

the reason some of them were able to unlock fully stable and usable is because there were actually two stories to their existence. the earlier ones were just as you say, defective quads with a disabled core, made into a triple. but later in their lives, in order to fill the segment when they would sell out, amd would just take some of their perfectly good quads and disable a core, and sell it as a triple. this is why there are quite a few that unlock and function perfectly, while there are others that totally do not, though sometimes a person would still get lucky with the defective ones and get a core that was good enough to use still too.

[@a.bamatraf6054]

i remember my phenom ii x2 555 and unlock it to x4 B55 , oh man it was very stable, not even touch any voltage config at all 😅

[@spiv]

i used to have a dual core Phenom II that i unlocked into a quad core. testing revealed 1 core to be unstable, so i disabled it and had a triple core machine for awhile for the price of a dual core. not the best result but still an improvement.

[@Carstuff111]

As someone who experienced a Phenom X3 (I believe it was) that was sucessfully unlocked to a full quad core, and lightly overclocked, it was possible. And it was amazing to see someone get a good chip. They were fine with a triple core, it would have been plenty, but he scored big for fairly little cash.

[@axescar]

There were even more interesting 5 and 6 core unlocks

[@Nobby76]

I had a Phenom II X2 Black. Which was a downgraded quadcore, when a few in the batch failed a core, they would just downgrade that entire batch and shut down 2 cores. One MIGHT be failed and one would be fine, but in a lot of cases you got a chip where both disabled cores were fine. If you bought the right motherboard for it, it would have a core unlocker built in. Which i did, i got it as a combo deal. Once i got them into the computer, the first thing i did was unlock the cores, then run a stress test on it. It ran perfect, so now i had a quadcore for the price of a dual core. BONUS!

[@Guy1699]

I still have my old 960T. The first $99 quad core. Unlocked to X6 and overclocked to 3.8, that was probably the best value in a CPU I've ever gotten. I actually upgraded my PC to play cyberpunk, only because of the missing instruction set.

[@RobertPendell]

Some skus (like the triple core) are created to allow them to sell off stock that doesn't quite meet the standard for what it was intended for. They tend to do this for an entire silicon sheet though so there are good ones in there too so some of them can be unlocked successfully without issue even though it got locked for QA reasons. Once the sku is created if there is enough demand they may intentionally take a higher end cpu and make the same changes to those to meet the demand for the filler sku which (again) can sometimes be unlocked to restore those locked features.

[@joshhuffman]

I remember having an AMD Phenom II 960t that was billed as a quad-core CPU, but ended up working with 6 cores for almost 3 years before I had to finally disable one and drop it to a 5-core CPU to maintain stability.

[@Nevakonaza.]

Man, that's fascinating. What made you have to disable it? did it just suddenly start becoming unstable?

[@deagt3388]

I remember this processor very well (I'm not proud of it...), I had a real AMD Phenom II X4, it was a great CPU! ;-)

[@TOM452]

I had the same cpu a long time ago, also tried unlocking it and couldn’t ever stabilise the additional core. It was a lot of fun just playing either it, as you said. I eventually ended up upgrading to a Phenom II X4 955, as it wasn’t very expensive, and was much faster.

[@zeroandplanb4life]

My phenom ii x3 720 black edition clocked to 4.2ghz on air cooling was such a sick chip. I can mod BIOS (even retail boards acer,hp,etc) for these chips if you ever interested in checking if you can unlock some extra settings etc. Numbers are indeed correct also i can point you to software suites dedicated to the phenom and athlon chips ive overclocked all of them all run extremely cool.

[@budrekot]

I had the x2 version of this cpu, and it unlocked to a quad succesfully, I used it for a few years. I might still have it somewhere.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Nice. Time to get it back out 😁

[@amilyester]

Wew. Talk about a blast from the past. I had a Athlon II X3 455? Unlocked to a Phenom II X4 B55 on a Gigabyte MB with 8GBs of DDR3 1333, 500GB spinning rust, Windows 7 and GTX 460 back in the day, all in the glorious Antec 300. Should've ponied up the cash to get a 2500K but when you're on a budget... Now on an R7 5700X a decade plus later :)

[@schonja9]

Back in the day I didn't buy into the Phenoms, as my Core 2 Duo still held up quite well, but I recently tried the Asrock unlocking feature on a cheap board+Phenom II X2 560 with 3.3 GHz stock. Unlocked both cores successfully and was able to Benchmark it at 4 GHz. (had to rise the voltage quite a bit). Running it on 4x3.7 GHz for gaming alongside a GTX460 which is a delightful combo. Really impressive what could be done back then, also the Core 2 based stuff took OC very well.

[@AlexHusTech]

*Your room is looking a lot better now with paint!*

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Haha yeah still needs another coat but it’s getting there!

[@m8x425]

Years ago I used to recommend the Phenom II x4 960T to people because it was possible to unlock a 5th or maybe a 6th core with this CPU.

[@justincase2312]

I too had a 960T unlocked to a hex core. It was my all time favourite CPU because of how much it could be tweaked and tuned. Great fun and unbeatable value for money.

[@LucasStaffel]

Ahhh man, those were the times hahaha!! I remember buying a Phenom II 960t, it was an AM3 CPU that also ran on a few AM2+ mobos, so I managed to upgrade only CPU and kept running an AM2+ board. Then I got an AM3+ board that had core unlocking, I managed to get into windows with mine running 6 cores but opening any game would crash. 5 cores did work half decently though!

[@Redmage913]

I wonder if lowering the clock multiplier might have helped with the terrifying amounts of voltage needed for the athlon’s stock speed with the unlocked core.

[@Trick-Framed]

Ok so originally they were from a binning process however as time went on they were still selling more 2 and 3 core units than quad cores so they started shutting down 1-2 cores depending on sku and selling them as dual or tri-core CPUs. You can tell which chips are which usually by the numbers on them. Sometimes the extra cache would still be there as well which added performance compared to the original binned x3 and x2 processors. If it is an earlier model, chances are the core doesn't work or isn't stable unlocked. In the newer ones they are plainly disabled, fully working, cores. Yes, there are dual core Athlons and Phenoms/II that have 2 full extra cores to unlock, although rare.

[@AhriiiVT]

Generally the cores were disabled either due to defective/unstable cores or alternatively to fill a lower product stack's stock. If I'm not mistaken those chips should be tolerant of upwards of 1.575V to 1.6V for ambient? Been a while since I looked into that, so not entirely sure how accurate that is. Great video as always :D

[@david0858too]

I got that board and a three core cpu in 2011. The forth core unlocked with no problem and it was my main computer for 5 or 6 years. I never had a single problem with the forth core, it was flawless.

[@rusevnikolay]

I've done this years ago. Found the stable clock and voltage, when all cores are enabled. I tested it brutally and it proved stable. The machine is used by a friend of mine (I decided to make a gift instead of selling it). The machine is 10+ years old and still holding well.

[@jedi9577]

It's actually pretty common to get fully stable unlocked cores with this method. AMD probably designed their CPU lineup and prices based on their yields just before launch. So at launch, I would expect to see a higher chance of getting defective cores on an X3 CPU. Yields generally improve over time. If you assume the relative sales volume for the X3 and X4 CPUs remains the same, then that requires AMD to start disabling fully functional chips to maintain the production volume for X3 CPUs as yields improve. That said, AMD can still be a bit selective when disabling functional cores. Chips with cores that don't clock as high or that consume more power relative to the others would be attractive options for becoming X3 CPUs.

[@tqrules01]

seems your Sample is only slightly lazy. The 95 watts / 1.425V is the default for the X3 425, if you unlock the other core your voltage should be around 1.480 to 1.520 or around 125 watts which is normal for this nm die on 4 cores at 3.6 ghz, That sort of voltage applied should normally be stable. After doing some more research it seems these early stepping's where notoriously hard to handle. Slightly newer cpu's seem to be less tragic. Still interesting video!

[@TheHangarHobbit]

Oh man I miss those days, I remember buying tons of Athlon X3s and Phenom X3s back in those days and finding many would easily unlock to a quad at the little PC shop I was working at, made for a bunch of great budget gamer rigs.

[@AndyGogo]

I did this years ago to my sempron 140 and it worked flawlessly, even OCd it from 2.7ghz to like 3.3. Its still serving faithfully as my dad's PC to this day!

[@deadmilkman121]

I very fondly remember buying a new phenom 2 550 x2 and buying a specific gigabyte board that has ACC on it. This beauty unlocked into a fully stable quad core and over clocked to 3.4ghz stable and I used it for five years. Good times thanks for reminding me with your video bud

[@srirachasauce8430]

Great video! I once owned a Phenom x2 B550, an unlocked to a very stable Phenom x4 B50. Not sure how rare those chips are these days.

[@Beisepimp]

A friend of mine got one of these back in the day and he got lucky and it worked just fine. I've expected much worse result in GTA V .

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Awesome. So did I 😂

[@wrmusic8736]

Back in 2008 I bought a Phenom II X2 550, a dual core CPU. Half an hour later it became a quad core X4 B50 at effectively 50% off and ran stable for many years. In fact according to polls ran at the time - a chance of getting a stable unlock was about 75%. Meaning only a quarter of AMD CPUs were really faulty, but AMD decided not to risk selling unstable quad cores at all - and simply locked cores on the whole production run where faulty ones were found.

[@Sandmansa]

I remember those old X3's. They were fun chips to toy around with.

[@Markknightexeter]

Haha this brings memories! I remember doing this with my x3 445, ran completely stable with no voltage increase!

[@Mini-z1994]

Did have an Athlon II X3 445 back in the day that unlocked to a quad core & also with a bit of an fsb overclock reached 3.5 ghz. On the motherboard i had to turn off the hardware monitor so the motherboard switched to the cpu socket temperature sensor as ofc the 4th cpu core had a dead temperature sensor that was wildly inaccurate, like 87c idle while cpu socket temperature says 28c. was in a Gigabyte 870A-UD3 rev 2.1 which is still my dads desktop pc, these days with a phenom II x6 1090t instead though. On a whole bunch of processors you had either a bad temperature sensor on the unlocked cores so it was perfectly fine as is, or if you were unlucky the extra core or cores had a bad cache on there preventing it from getting unlocked.

[@JYKDutchYT]

Hi RandomgaminginHD it's good to see you back again :)

[@tancar2004]

Yes these products were often created to sell chips with defective cores. But the thing is now now you have a 3 core CPU sitting on store shelves and you need to maintain inventory of that product. So yeah CPU's with defective cores like this one would be sold in this manner but in order to maintain inventory they would intentionally cripple fully functional chips and sell them. This was a holy grail and the reason for the unlocking feature in the bios. You could buy an X2 or X3 chip for cheap and if you were lucky you could unlock a fully functional X4. It's also striking to me that Counterstrike has evolved so much that you can't play it on an old Athlon. In 2005 I played counterstrike for hours on the very first dual core Athlon.

[@doomslayerdave]

I always felt that turning a single core Sempron into a dual core was the greatest value ever. The 140 was legendary

[@pjcnet]

I remember what could be a bonus core, it was a lottery and yes the additional core obviously failed quality checks, but some people were very lucky and were still able to enable it without any issues.

[@Thee_Dr_Evil]

ah, my 555 black unlocked to a quad back in the day, loved those days of free processing power.

[@gen_angry]

Some were quads disabled into triples due to defects and just making use of what they could. Both companies still do this for all their products, just now they're actually cut off with a laser so you can't unlock it. Some were just disabled due to demand (better to sell a quad set to triple than nothing at all), which is what these boards took advantage of - especially in the later months when yield got better.

[@J0xxe]

First pc I built had Phenom II X2 555, which was unlockable to Phenom II X4 B55. That thing was insane value for money.

[@davidromero3122]

I had this CPU back in the day! Good times! Mine did unlock the 4th core without problem so I was quite happy with that.

[@producerevan88]

Ah I had one of these!! It was a free build I slapped together working at a staples and it kicked so many butts at the time. I got that unlocked core and I think +200mhz on all cores. Miss that lil screamer

[@RuruFIN]

I had a Phenom II X2 555BE which unlocked to X4 and I overclocked it to 4.2GHz. What a speed bump.

[@asiano3385]

I would like to "download" more instruction sets to the CPU.

[@linuxpirate]

My first gaming pc featured a "Core unlock" asrock board and a dual core Phenom II X2. I had no stability issues unlocking the two disabled cores turning it into a Phenom II x4 BE but I got lucky my dual core was just artificially neutered.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Awesome. Some people had no trouble at all with these. Others couldn’t even activate the extra core(s). This one was somewhere in between. It worked but it was pretty unstable

[@epidemicmagick]

@@RandomGaminginHDFrom what I understand a lot of the later runs of those locked processors were locked just to move inventory and weren't faulty at all.

[@Kanivalos80]

These cpus are ancient, unlocking the core ups the TDP to 120w (mine was stable with less volts). If you have one with a gpu that can do some kind of hardware acceleration, they can still browse the internet/office. People literally give away 1155 systems, these can do more.

[@theorphanobliterator]

it would be very cool to see other unlocked CPUs

[@TheCooperman666]

My phenom 2 x4 965BE ran at 1.5v out the box back in the day...the phenom's where power hungery

[@drakin8563]

Did you try reducing the multiplier after unlocking the core? That may allow for a lower voltage and increased stability. It's possible that when they had to lock the core they decided to increase the clock speed to offset some of the performance losses. That may explain why the voltage seems rather high on the "stock" chip.

[@darren253]

I remember the X3 Phenom 2 processors and certain software was puzzled by them.

[@Frittentheo]

Until last year I used an X3 400e as a multimedia PC in combination with a Quadro 600 on the TV for movies. But the computer used too much power and ended up no longer playing 1080p video without stuttering. My motherboard didn't offer the core unlock function.

[@Rapscallion2009]

This is when overclocking was really worthwhile. You could get a lot of FREE performance. These days it's pretty meagre pickings after whatever core boost has done its part.

[@guaiqueritech]

I had some Sempron 145, single core processors that, with the right board, could have an extra core unlocked, tuning them into Athlons. This was an interesting ways of getting a product into market instead of throwing them away. Despite testing at least 10 of them, I never managed to make a stable unlock: some of them refused to boot, others bootlooped and one of them managed to run windows, but showing artifacts all over the screen.

[@StishFicks]

I got an AMD Sempron 140 years ago from a friend and was able to unlock it into an Athlon II X2 440. It was actually stable and for $20, that was a cheap way to get a dual-core CPU.

[@Krisztian5HUN]

My Phenom II X2 550 dual core unlocked to 4 core, still running strong today, for internet , movie and office use is still ok

[@marsovac]

I have a Phenom II X2 unlocked to X4, albeit with a more complicated BIOS thing from Gigabyte. The best thing is that it needed no additional voltage, and I could overlock it to 3.6Ghz. It is now good for watching youtube and general windows usage. But the power consumption is crazy for a 4 core cpu.

[@69Dartman]

I remember when you could do that but never had anything that could do it. I have done all kinds of updates and cross flashes before but things moved forward so much since then.

[@sirtanon1]

I ran an unlocked AMD CPU in my main rig for a good 4 or 5 years. I had purchased an Athlon II X2 555 BE specifically because it was unlockable. I was successful and was able to unlock it to a Phenom II X4 B55 and on top of that even overclock it from 3.2 to 3.4. It was a great CPU until I replaced it with a Bulldozer.

[@Howch125]

I spent my Sunday playing GTAIV too!! With all the GTA excitement right now I decided to pick it up as it is the only GTA I have never played though. I am having lots of fun with it :)

[@hafeez387]

some just had them disabled to meet demands

[@bigjoeangel]

Rumour has it that there's a special hack where you can turn a Ryzen 5600 into Ryzen 5800X3D. I think it involves a web browser and a credit card.

[@LetsPlayBojangles]

Amd has always been known to down bin products lower in the stack without physically disabling them fully. Vega 56s were often times down binned 64s that had some cores Xus non working so people were able to flash their vega 56 to a Vega 56-63 depending on how lucky you were. You should try your luck for a video!

[@Nevakonaza.]

I find this fascinating, Id love to know just how many of these CPUs were meant to actually be Phenoms and if the bad yield rates were a pretty common thing...why, Why was their yield rates particularly bad with this generation of CPU...i find it fascinating that unlocking the core also gave you extra cache too. Assume its within the disabled die itself?..id love to see more testing, Maybe get one of those 4 core CPUs and see if it'll unlock to an X6.

[@jozsiolah1435]

That’s what I probably do with an Amd X2 laptop. I played cod 4, and took out both choppers with the rockets. The game became instantly much faster, and the laptop remained faster. The rockets are at the bus, and the further chopper has to be fired first, then the closer. It took me 10 retries at 2.1 ghz.

[@BowserSmb-t2k]

I didnt know you could do this. My younger self would have been thrilled.

[@dissocialdolphin8518]

This was the CPU on my first ever PC when I was 11 years old. I managed to unlock de 4th core and convinced my parents to buy a graphics card (a GT610 for 30€) and that was enough for me at that time to go on Skype with my friends and play Minecraft and Counter Strike for some good years.

[@cjsdudesweet]

nice video dude, if you find AMD Sempron 145 & try benchmark that cpu

[@NelsonBigGunP200Fan]

Yep. I had one that was a dual and it was unlocked to a quad core. I believe AM3 socket. it actually did real well, had to get a better HSF but it worked.

[@MatWilson2612]

1.4-1.45v was normal for these chips, but definitely agree that 1.5v for an unstable chip is definitely why it was locked to 3 cores. The best one was the Phenom x4 960t which could unlock to a hex core or if it failed - you'd just clock it higher. These were rumored that the later chips were more likely to be fine as binning got better and AMD sold functional 4 and 6 core CPUs as 3 and 4 cores.

[@drunkenn00b]

I used to run a P2 X4 960t unlocked to 6cores @3,6GHz. It was so good for its money. Sadly missing some intruction sets. I still have it lying around in my basement 🥰

[@eligaller9190]

My brother bought a dual core phenom back then and got a fully stable quad core, even overclocked. As i remember he did unlocked the cpu on a rather high end asus mainborad with a fx9xx chipset.

[@milestailprower]

Anything pre-Nehalem and pre-Bulldozer is usually something I ignore these days. A lot of games require SSE4.2 for things like anti-cheat. While the K10 CPUs were pretty good (and some had better singled threaded performance than Bulldozer), the fact that its stuck at SSE4A really limits what you can do. Maybe it's fine to use some for loaner PCs at a LAN party if older games are being played. You can also transform those old parts into a home server and/or NAS. However, it still is interesting to see the days were you could unlock an extra core, or fit LGA 771 into LGA 775 boards and get it working with a microcode update.

[@MaybeMizuki]

I think that was THE exact CPU in my first PC. Funny seeing it here again :D

[@HrisG]

would love to see a video on the i5 4570! I have one and currently looking forward to upgrading to a R5 3600

[@kaozer666]

I had one back in the day that the only thing that didnt work when unlocking the core was the temp readout. Granted thats not good... But i had that chip going from 3 core at 2.6ghz to 4 cores at 3.5! I was impressed with thw little thing!

[@xismecwilliams9604]

And phenom II had a way of unlocking 2 extra cores on one of the cpu I had. I loved my phenom II system it was the last computer I had I gave it away years ago and never bothered with a pc again. I think it was a phenom II 555 x2, that easily turns to a Phenom II B55 x4.

[@Saintbow]

I have the Phenom II Triple core unlocked into a quadcore and it is a lil' beast of a old CPU. What is funny is the core speed of the triple core was at 3.4 (paid $7 for it) where as my Black edition Phenom II quad core was at 3.2 (Paid $28 for it). But when you unlock the triple core, it keeps the speed and now is faster then the more expensive quad core. I think it cost me around $70ish to build the whole retro gaming computer using the triple core as my cpu.