Chinese hacks over at inpai.com.cn have published a straightforward guide to unlocking the L3 cache, disabled on Athlon II triple-core processor.
The procedure was successfully tested on an
Athlon
II X3 435 and all 6MB of dormant cache memory was brought to life. This
effectively turned the Athlon into a Phenom and offered a 10 to 20
percent performance boost at no significant cost in heat dissipation or
power consumption.
However, the bad news is that most users will not be able to try it
out. The feature is currently limited to MSI boards only, and only
recent boards running on a fresh BIOS.
Well, at least MSI will get some free PR out of it.
Check it out here.