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. (more…)
