AMD Athlon II X3 can be unlocked to X4

A while ago, it was reported that it was possible to re-enable the disabled fourth core of AMD's Phenom II X3 processors. The fourth core of these triple-core processors can be enabled and used on motherboards that feature an AMI BIOS with ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) functionality. ASRock now states that the same trick is possible with two -as of yet- unreleased Athlon II X3 processors, namely the Athlon II X3 400e and Athlon II X3 405e. The manufacturer claims that these processors will become available somewhere in the summer of this year.

After unlocking the Athlon II X3 405e's fourth core, CPU-Z recognizes it as a Phenom II X4 B05e

ASRock has used an Athlon II X3 405e to create a list of its motherboards that are able to transform the triplecore processors to quadcores. The diagram below shows the motherboards with their required BIOS versions. A notable fact is that this trick can not be used on every Athlon II X3 processors; some of the models will actually feature a disfunctional fourth core, rendering it useless. It's interesting to see that ASRock experiences the unlock trick from triple- to quadcore as a feature rather than a bug.

Tags: bios phenom athlon

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