Asus Core Unlocker and You!

[ChrisIOMUK]

Even though it is listed on Asus's own website under most of the New 8** series boards they will not officially support it and there doesn't appear to be anywhere where they tell you how it works so I will explain from my experience. First a little history, with the 7** chipsets AMD included a tool called ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) which allowed users to tweak CPU performance and also 'unlock' any dormant cores or cache that AMD had disabled for one of many reasons at production. These features where disabled mainly due to quality testing failures but also to fill large orders to big retailers when demand for dual and tripple core outweighed demand for quad+ core. ACC was good but also a little user unfriendly as it called for you to play around with disabled cores and voltages to get the PC to even post in some cases. With a later BIOS revision for the 7 series boards AMD removed the 'ACC' feature this could have been to boost sales of their quad and hex cored CPU's by preventing cheaper chips to be unlocked but no real reason was given by AMD themselves. ACC was completely left out of the 8 series boards but this did not stop the major manufacturers from working around this and so we get to Asus' Core Unlocker.

 

Core Unlocker intelligently scans your CPU for dormant features and then automatically tests them out and ajusts your system to try and get it to post. My experience was with an Athlon II X3 440 which it transformed into a Phenom II X3.

 

On inserting my new CPU I first started the PC with no modification to make sure the chip was 100% out of the box. Then I reset the PC and on the BIOS information screen pressed the number 4 key as it advises. The computer reset straight away, failed to post and reset again and failed to post, then on its third attempt started up displaying the message '**Three Cores Activated!**', not a great omen as it was a 3 core CPU to start but on opening CPU-Z once in windows it showed that the 6MB level 3 cache had been unlocked effectively turning the athlon into a phenom.

 

My observation of the startup process was this, the first time it reset after pressing the number 4 key it was trying the CPU with all 4 cores and the cache but failed to post so it reset again this time starting with the 4 cores and no L3 cache but again failed to post and finally it started with the original 3 cores plus the cache and worked. No fuss or fiddling for me at all.

 

It is now 4 days since and I have played many hours of Bad Company II and GTA4, I have also run Prime95 for two hours carefully monitoring heat levels using speed fan (I will explain this next) with no issues what so ever. My conclusion is this, the original Phenom II had a faulty core at the factory and therefore this was deactivated along with the L3 cache and moved to the Athlon X3 'out pile', why not to the Phenom II X3 pile with the cache enabled, because there isn't currently a production run of Phenom II X3's as the 720 have been discontinued ever since the price drop on 955BE's.

 

Now the only issue as far as I can tell with the process, when activating your extra features for some reason it deactivates the individual core heat sensors leaving the only way of watching heat levels with the motherboards own CPU socket heat sensor, speed fan seems like the easiest tool for this and worked well for testing. I would say this is a small price to pay for the extra performance.

 

Unlockable AMD processors that I have read about are,

 

All Athlon II X3's start as either an Athlon II X4(AAD** AD) or Phenom II X4(AAC** AC) so always have a dormant core and sometimes L3 cache.

Athlon II X4's mostly start as Athlon II X4's but Phenom II X4's that fail quality tests or if there is demand more for Athlon's have been used.

Phenom II X2's all start as Phenom II X4's but are downgraded for the same reasons as the Athlons but have been noted as being the most likely to unlock without fault.

Phenom II X3's all start as Phenom II X4's but are downgraded for the same reasons as the Athlons.

 

Worth Note :- While it now seems they will not be released there where plans to launch a Phenom II X4 960T which was actually a Phenom II X6 with 2 cores disabled but this seems to have been cancelled now by AMD but keep an eye out, Im sure they will do something with all the failed Phenom II X6's which while most probably faulty may have 5 working cores.

 

Please feel free to post your 'Core Unlocker' success and failure stories here so that others can learn from the experience.

Edited October 6, 2010 by ChrisIOMUK

[GabrielT]

This clears a lot up for me

Thank you.

[zackhaf]

this sounds like an awesome opportunity to me. if all goes well, you can get a better processor for the price of a cheap one!

[IVIYTH0S]

This reminded me to reattempt unlocking my cousin's x4 620's cache (and being at 3.4ghz it'd essentially become a 965 )

Nice post