Newer AMD Boards Still Support Core Unlocking

Category: Motherboards, CPU's
Posted: July 31, 2009 08:06AM
Author: redtigerdragon

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A while back, news came out that the new AMD Phenom II processors could have their dormant cores unlocked. This caused many people to consider buying into the red camp, as a cheaper tri- or dual-core processor and a cheap motherboard could. With the help of not-so-good BIOS-coding associated with the Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC), get you a quad core for half the price (or significant savings). As soon as news got out, AMD was quick to tell the motherboard manufacturers to release new BIOS updates to fix the issue, and while some did, many didn't (You have to wonder how hard they pushed, considering how well the items sold). Well, apparently the "problem" still persists in AMD's newest chipset, the 785G+SB710 chipset. At the Chinese website Coolaler.com, they were able to not only unlock cores using MSI's 785GM-E65 and a Phenom II X2 550, but also has good overclock stability to boot. They set ACC to auto, which unlocked all 4 cores, were able to overclock it to 3.609 GHz (18 x 200 MHz, 1.344 V), and tested stability using two instances of Orthos. Seems like AMD is still champ for the "more for less" category.