ASRock Wants You to Unlock Your Phenom Cores
ASRock Wants You to Unlock Your Phenom Cores
Posted 03/03/2010 at 8:14am
| by Paul Lilly
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ASRock recently stated it wanted to start targeting the enthusiast crowd, and making good on that intention, the company will start slapping a new UCC chip onto its motherboards.
So what's the big deal? UCC stands for Unlock CPU Core, and as you might have guessed, it's designed to make easy-work out of turning AMD's triple-core processors into unlocked quad-core parts. All you do is go into the BIOS, enter one of the options, and if the parts play nice together, you'll be sitting pretty with four cores where previously there were three.
The best part about this is ASRock said it intends to plop the UCC chip onto entry-level motherboards too. This tactic of putting high-end features onto lower-priced parts has helped ASRock build a following, and something like this could go a long way in upping the company's geek cred.
Image Credit: Fudzilla
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avenger48
March 03, 2010 at 2:59pm
AMD's ACC is available on any board with an SB710 or SB750 southbridge, or NCC for any board with a nForce 700 or 900 series northbridge. These options do THE EXACT SAME THING as this chip does. I wouldnt be surprised if Foxconn is just relabling the ACC option in the BIOS. Also, ACC and NCC have been available for a long time (since about when 790 GX came out). What's the difference?
Caboose
March 03, 2010 at 10:57am
Cool! Cheap way to get that possible quad-core CPU.
I wonder what AMD will say about this...
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
DBsantos77
March 03, 2010 at 5:57pm
Probably nothing, as they will keep selling their TRI's with people hoping that they get Quads.
I got a quad for $115 :)
-Santos
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GMoney86
March 03, 2010 at 8:45am
I would be worried that the fourth core was disabled because it was flawed. I guess if you are lucky and the processor is not flawed (but just part of a batch with flawed cores), this would be a great thing. How often does AMD just disable a core when it isn't faulty? I wouldn't do it unless there were doubts about its functionality.
lien_meat
March 03, 2010 at 2:16pm
I was also under the impression that most of the tri cores were just defective quads. I have an odd feeling that unless they have a really awesome disclaimer, there are gonna be quite a few people returning these and trying to get their money back when they don't work the way the hoped they would...
Techrocket9
March 03, 2010 at 9:08am
Acutally I beleve that demand for tricores is greater than the failure rate, so AMD soft-disables some quad cores to sell as tri. Those chips would likely be the target of this chip.
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