Triple-core Phenoms have fourth core enabled
A KOREAN WEBSITE HAS apparently managed to turn on the additional core in a triple-core Phenom II X3 710 processor making it into a quad core processor.
According to Playwares.com, all you have to do to open up the extra core is go into the bios and set the Advanced Clock Calibration to 'Auto' and restart the machine and, hey presto... four cores!
Apparently, the jiggery pokery only works with Biostar motherboards and you can be sure that if AMD deliberately hobbled one of the processor's cores, they have a pretty good reason for doing so.
It's not clear whether the additional core is capable of doing any practical processing but the Bios as well as a number of analytical tools including Prime95, 3DMark and Futuremark, certainly seem to recognise the fourth core's presence.
Before...
After... by golly an extra core
The big question is, who's going to cough up the extra cash for a quad core Phenom when you can get a much cheaper triple core version and simply switch on the fourth core?
Or will the flaky fourth core fall over sharpish?
