Semperon 140 unlocked core at 3.65GHz

[seabreeze]

This is not a new thing, installing a Semperon 140 True Single Core (that's what's on the box), changing ACC in BIOS and getting the other core running. Two cores for the price of one. Here it is running at 3.65GHz. It can go a bit higher, but I didn't need to cook my dinner on it, so 3.65GHz it is.

Of course, once that's done, cpu-z does't see it as a Semperon anymore, but looks don't count for everything (I hope).

 

[mindless728]

idk, i think you may be pushing the vcore a little too much if on air, i would scale the vcore back until unstable i think you could get it lower (do you have it on auto?)

 

[seabreeze]

Its was just for fun. The Semperon has already gone into another system and this one has a PII X4 940BE in it (again, for now). It probably was on auto.

 

[angry_ducky]

Sweet! What motherboard are you using?

Ever since I heard some of these Semprons are unlocking, I've been considering one for a budget upgrade. I just don't want to spend too much on the motherboard; otherwise it would make more sense to just get an Athlon X2 240, and I'll be really upset if it doesn't unlock, as I don't want to be stuck with (another) single-core CPU.

 

[seabreeze]

For that it was a Asrock AOD790GX/128M. It's set up permanently on the bench with 4GB RAM + 4890, mainly for benching processors and general mucking around. Of course, it doesn't make much financial sense to make that a permanent set up.

I've put the Semperon 140 in an Asrock A780GM-LE mb. This is about as inexpensive a board as I could find with ACC. It's only getting to 230x13.5=3.1GHz at the moment, but the real benefit is (of course) unlocking the second core: two cores for the price of one. I like that idea. It's another bonus to get some extra speed as well.

Instead of 1 x core @ 2.7GHz it's nice to have 2 x cores @ 3.1GHz for the same money. I can live with that.

 

[maniac5999]

Is it prime95 stable with 2 cores or is it just "running".

They disable a core and sell it as a single core usually because there was something wrong with the second core. If it had passed the tests it would have been sold as a dual core.

Not nececarily. In the beginning of a new process the failure rate is high, and they generally do have tons of processors with "bad" cores, that they rebadge and sell as -X3 -X2 and -X1 processors, because that's the number of functional cores that they have. What we need to remember is that AMD's been in commercial production of 45nm processors for almost 10 months now, and that means that the yields are way up where they have many to many processors that bin very high. (x4 965s, etc) This means that in order to fill the pricepoints at more mainstream levels AMD has to take chips and lock out perfectly good cores, and lock multipliers well below what the chips are capable of in order to have enough chips to sell at those levels.

To sum it all up, it's basically a crapshoot. you may have a processor that has perfectly good cores hidden away, or you may have a processor where the cores are locked because they're completely non-functional.

 

[seabreeze]

It seems to like the volts, not much in the way of heat. I'm beginning to think there is a hole in the processor leaking volts, maybe a pool of volts under the bench... Might be the reason it was made a Semperon, too many leaks, too many lost volts.

Prime95 - I'll get right on that. Mainly been running the other tests and trying to squeeze a bit more out of the graphics card. Also seeing what maximum overclock is without any changes except clock speed (it seems it 220MHzx13.5=2.9GHz). That's ok for being lazy.

 

[seabreeze]

Yes, it seems 220MHz was about it on default settings. Here are some results at 3374MHz:

3D Mark 06 11,615
PC Mark 05 7,789

Prime95 for 5 hours

For a $53.00 processor (USD40.00 or so) and a $77.00 motherboard (USD62.00), this seems to be a reasonable results. Buy one core, get two, then give them a push. I no complain.

 

[maniac5999]

Yeah, you basically turned my comments into a longer story.

Sorry, I'm on here during my downtime at work. When I started typing my response yours wasn't up yet, then I got busy for an hour and by the time i posted you had already beaten me to it.