A few weeks ago news hit the tubes that a “bug” or “glitch” or what have you in the BIOS of certain AMD 790FX and 790GX motherboards allowed the unintentional unlocking of a magical fourth core on AMD Phenom II X3 processors. After the initial story hit, the community was quick to offer up confirmation of the wonderfully advantageous hiccup. Of course, those who stand to make money by selling quad-core processors instead of tri-core processors may not take too kindly to this morsel of info; but never fear! We have back-up copies of the BIOSes that allow the fourth core to unlock.

Now granted, we should probably point out that your mileage with this trick may vary. Phenom II X3 processors are sold as X3 processors for good reason: one core on a previously quad-core part was faulty, incomplete, or just plain messed up. The tri-core idea itself is widely believed to be an attempt by AMD to maximize profits from a single silicon wafer by increasing yield. As a result, unlocking a fourth core on a processor that is meant to have only three cores could very likely result in some wacky performance. To expect anything other than random crashes and processing errors can only be considered extremely optimistic, though dozens of threads have popped up on enthusiast forums relaying success stories.

The process of unlocking the fourth core is actually very simple and mostly nonsensical. All you have to do is go into the BIOS and toggle the Advanced Clock Calibration setting to “Auto”. Upon restart, you should see that the POST screen now incorrectly displays the name of your processor as an X4.

Ironically, this development has gone a long ways at improving AMD’s rep amongst the budget enthusiast community and by several reports has provided a nice boost to sales of Phenom II X3 processors.

The AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE in particular has become an increasingly attractive part for budget gamers and enthusiasts alike. The newest member to the “Black Edition” family has already proven its worth as an overclocking friendly part. Unlocking the fourth core does little to impair this overclocking ability. So now a tri-core, 2.8GHz processor can be tweaked a bit to become a quad-core 4.2GHz processor. All for $147. Quite the bargain.

You can find the the bios files here. These ones are for Biostar 790GX and FX boards. Good luck and have fun.

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