Extra Cores for Free
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 is simply 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 Blue Screen 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 fixed 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!
