The Ultimate Hardware Hackers Guide: 11 Projects For PC Power Users

Posted 03/14/2012 at 11:58am | by Marco Chiappetta

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11 DIY projects to unleash your gear’s hidden power—for free!

There are several practices that distinguish true power users from common folk. System building is one. Component benchmarking certainly applies. As does religious parts swapping. And then, of course, there’s hardware hacking. Hacking, more than anything else, exemplifies our ongoing quest for more—more performance, more functionality, more power—because we’re wringing this extra goodness from gear we already own, using crafty methods and occasionally pushing the bounds of practicality in the process; sometimes just for the heck (or should we say hack?) of it.

We know that GPUs and CPUs often have features disabled or dialed back in order to fit a price point. We’ll show you some nifty ways to access their hidden capabilities, as well as some fixes for inherent flaws. We also know that our gear can be made to do more than it was intended to with the help of third-party software, as you’ll discover in our webcam and Roku projects. And if you want to make your smartphone smarter, increase your Wi-Fi router’s range, or RAID your SSDs, we’ll turn you on to those tricks, too. 

So what are you waiting for? Let’s get hacking!  

Overclock AMD Bulldozer

After years of AMD hyping the Bulldozer microarchitecture for its supposed efficiencies, the initial batch of Bulldozer-based AMD FX Series processors arrived with a resounding thud due to disappointing performance and relatively high power consumption. But amid all the fervor following the launch, many enthusiasts seem to have missed the fact that AMD’s current flagship FX-8150 is still technically the fastest desktop processor the company has released to date. Of course, being the fastest processor in AMD’s line-up doesn’t mean there isn’t some frequency headroom left under the hood. It turns out that the Bulldozer-based AMD FX-8150 is a pretty decent overclocker.

We all saw the reports of AMD’s Bulldozer breaking overclocking records and earning a place in the Guinness World Records. But those overclocks were performed with liquid-helium cooling, binned chips, extreme voltages, and only a single Bulldozer module (two cores) enabled. Overclocking a retail-ready processor with all of its cores enabled using more traditional cooling methods is a different story altogether. Luckily, not much has changed with Bulldozer in the overclocking department; the tried and true methods of tweaking multipliers, voltages, and the HyperTransport clock that worked with the Phenom II carry over to Bulldozer, as well.

We set out to see what kind of overclocks were possible with an AMD FX-8150 using a standard air-cooler and an AMD 990FX-based Asus motherboard. Instead of using the motherboard’s UEFI to overclock, though, we turned to AMD’s OverDrive utility, which lets users overclock from within Windows in real-time without having to reboot and waste time constantly restarting a system.

The AMD OverDrive real-time overclocking and system-monitoring utility is a great tool for tweaking the performance of a Bulldozer-based system when used in conjunction with the right motherboard.

Because FX Series processors are “unlocked,” their multipliers can be raised or lowered to increase or decrease the CPU frequency at will. Increasing or decreasing the HT clock has the same effect, and pumping more voltage into a chip will typically allow for higher frequencies, as well, provided it is adequately cooled.

The FX-8150 has a base clock of 3.6GHz, which will dip down to 1.4GHz while idling. When half (or fewer) of its cores are being utilized, the FX-8150 is able to Turbo up to a peak frequency of 4.2GHz. When all of its cores are being fully utilized, the FX-8150 can Turbo up to 3.9GHz. And while all of this is happening, the processor’s voltage will fluctuate between approximately .85v and 1.36v. By disabling Turbo, turning the voltage up beyond 1.4v, and cranking up the CPU multiplier with AMD’s OverDrive utility, all of the cores on the chip can run at even faster speeds and offer much better overall performance.

How much faster the FX-8150 will run varies from chip to chip, but we found that at 1.4125v, our CPU could reliably hit 4.41GHz (22x multiplier x 200MHz HT clock). At frequencies any higher at that voltage, the test bed was unstable, and pumping upwards of 1.5v into a 32nm chip with air cooling isn’t ideal. To hit 4.41GHz, we simply launched OverDrive, chose Advanced mode, disabled Turbo, and moved the CPU multiplier and voltage sliders as necessary. Please note that the CPU settings in your BIOS/UEFI should be set to Auto should you want to experiment with OverDrive.

When running at 4.41GHz, the FX-8150 offered up a Cinebench R11.5 score of 7.31, an increase of 1.3 points, or 21.6 percent, over the stock score of 6.01. And its temperature peaked at only 71 C. That kind of performance boost won’t allow the FX-8150 to overtake many of Intel’s faster chips, but it’s a huge gain nonetheless and one that’s easily obtained using OverDrive.

AMD Core Unlocking: Unleash Dormant CPU Cores

In the early stage of a processor architecture’s lifetime, it is common for multicore dies with nonfunctional cores to be harvested for use in lower-end products, while fully functional dies end up at the high-end. Over time, however, as manufacturing processes mature and yield increases, there are fewer and fewer dies with nonfunctional elements to harvest. If there is still demand for lower-cost processors, though, in lieu of expending engineering resources designing a new, cheaper-to-produce core, chip makers like AMD will often disable perfectly good cores in an existing CPU design to satiate the market. 

The UEFI utility on Asus’ P9X79 Deluxe motherboard allowed us to take our Sandy Bridge-E based Core i7-3960X to 4.75GHz by altering only a few options in the Ai Tweaker menu.

Such is the case with a number of chips in AMD’s aging Phenom II product line. After years in production, yields are high on quad-core versions of the chip, but there is still a relatively large demand for cheaper, dual- and triple-core Phenom II processors. As such, many of those dual- and triple-core chips have additional cores on-die that are functional, but dormant. Manufacturers of enthusiast class motherboards, however, have devised BIOS/UEFI-level tricks to unlock those cores and turn cheap processors into something much more powerful.

Unlocking cores is very easy, provided you’ve got the right CPU and motherboard combo. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and other motherboard makers all offer Socket AM3/AM3+ boards with core unlocking capabilities (the boards require a SB7x0 or newer south bridge with Advanced Clock Calibration). As for the processors, many Phenom II X2, Phenom II X3, and Athlon II X3 chips are unlockable. Although not guaranteed, processors from newer batches should have no trouble being unlocked. If you’ve got one of these processors, do a quick search to see if others have had success with it—most likely they have.

To actually perform the unlock requires nothing more than entering the BIOS/UEFI, heading into the Advanced CPU configuration menu and enabling Core Unlocking or ACC (or whatever the motherboard manufacturer has called the setting). Keep in mind, though, should your chip unlock without incident, it may require increased cooling to deal with the additional active cores.

Up Next: Overclock Sandy Bridge-E!