Athlon X2 7750 BE Quad-Core Enabled via BIOS Trick

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Osiris

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Athlon X2 7750 BE Quad-Core Enabled via BIOS Trick

Looks like owners of the Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition can unlock two more CPU cores by merely exploiting flawed BIOS code. This trick was used on a Phenom II X3 as well. There's usually a reason for the cores to be disabled though. I wonder if you gain 2 cores but sacrifice stability.


This was made possible by the way AMD has been designing its triple-core and dual-core processors based on the K10 "Stars" architecture: by disabling one or two cores on the quad-core die. "Sloppy" BIOS coding lead to the Phenom II X3 anomaly. It looks like a somewhat similar mod enables not one, but two cores on the sub-$100 Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition.
 
They wouldn't all be able to do it, and most of the time they would be terribly unstable. My x3 720 can't do it, even at stock settings...freezes up at the Vista loading screen.

I may pick up a 7750 just to try this out...you know, when I'm not broke.
 
From what I have read about this the extra cores are really unstable which is why they were disabled. If you are lucky enough to have stable cores they will not generally overclock as well. hikaricloud unlocked his forth core and it was extremely unstable.

So a lucky few can get a cheap quad core.
 
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