Back in the late part of 2010, I decided to pick up an AMD Athlon II X3 440 3.0GHz triple core processor, to see if I could get the 4th core to unlock. I did some research that quite a few were getting the 4th core to unlock and run stable.
These processors started life off as a Phenom II X4 (Denab) quad core. During the quality testing if there was an issue with one of the cores, they would either lock the 4th core and sell it as a Phenom II X3 triple core or they would physically cut the L3 Cache and sell it as an Athlon II X3 triple core. Sometimes you could get really lucky if there was demand for the triple core processor and all four cores worked perfectly.
For the price tag of just around $100, I figured I had nothing to lose. So I purchased the CPU and put it into my Biostar motherboard and with the press of the F4 key on boot up, the board unlocked the 4th core and after stress testing it was stable. The only issue was the temp sensor for the 4th core was not working, which is why this quad core Phenom II became a triple core Athlon II. I didn’t overclock the processor because the AMD chips ran hot and I only had the stock heat sink.
Here are the system specs and the benchmarks. Enjoy.
- AMD Phenom II X4 B40 Quad Core 3.0GHz (Denab) Socket AM3/AM2+ – Biostar TA A785GE
- Stock Heatsink
- 2GB Mushkin Silverline DDR2 PC-6400 DDR2-800MHz (2x1GB)
- XFX AMD Radeon HD 5770 1GB/EVGA GeForce GTX 460
- 500GB WD Caviar Blue 7200rpm SATII 16MB
- Logitech X-230 2.1 Speakers
- NZXT Gamma Mid-Tower Case
- OCZ Mod XStream 500 Watt PSU
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
You can see the slight increase in the 3DMark Vantage score after the 4th core was unlocked. You can see a huge increase in the 3DMark Vantage score when I replaced the AMD Radeon HD 5770 with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460.
That is it for now. Until next week.
- Jerry
Tags: AMD, Athlon II X3 440, Denab, Phenom, Phenom II X4, Phenom II X4 B40, Quad Core, triple core