It’s an improvement worthy of the greatest trick of all time, the 9800 Pro pencil mod — and probably just as boneheaded of an idea to try. This little hack enables the latent fourth core on certain Phenom processors, assuming you’ve got a certain type of Biostar mobo. Of course, there’s probably a little more to it than that, so I’d hold off on this unless you’re feeling really adventurous.
Essentially, you just need a motherboard with the “Advanced Clock Calibration” option in the BIOS setup screen, which you set to “auto,” and like magic it detects and starts using that fourth core. Apparently it gets detected and used by Windows, though there’s no telling what mischief may come of this kind of behavior.
[via Tom's Hardware]
haha interesting. I would like too see some performance monitor screens of the 4th core really in use though.
You know why the fourth core is turned off?
In early processors its a way to get better yield they take the four core chips that have a screwed up core and disable it and rename it and ship it out as a 3 core chip.
So undoing this may be bring online a bum cpu.
(in some cases they may be selling more 3 core cpus than the aboved mentioned process creates in that case you may actually have 4 good cores as they ship the fully functioning 4 core as a 3 core to fill orders.)
Yeah, that’s what I figured. I’m thinking pretty soon they’ll have manufacturing runs that work and don’t work posted somewhere.