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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

I recall sometime around the 2000s they had Athlons that you could overclock by using a pencil to connect a couple contacts on top of the chip.

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Those were the Phenom Tripple Core Chips you are thinking of. What the Pencil mod did was enable the 4th core on the Tripple Core Chips. However, the 4th Core was likely a factory rejected core for some reason or another, so enabling it could lead to instability

> However, the 4th Core was likely a factory rejected core for some reason or another, so enabling it could lead to instability

It may have been a defective core, but when they make these cut-down SKUs they need to meet a quota of units regardless of whether that many salvagable defective chips roll off the line, so it's not uncommon for them to disable perfectly functional hardware. Especially as the process matures and yields improve.

I remember you could turn a GeForce 6600GS into a GeForce 6800GT using the pencil mod and a firmware flash that was pretty scandalous.

I remember doing exactly that with one of my Athlon's. Don't remember if it was an Athlon XP or Athlon 64, but they'd removed a jumper on the top and you just needed a 2B pencil to join the pads to get a free upgrade.

Good times.

You could turn an Athlon Barton 2500+ into a 3200+ just by turning the FSB up to 200MHz. It was the easiest overclock I've ever done.

Couldn't you also turn your Athlon x2 into an Athlon x3 occssionally?

I did that with a Phenom II X2 555. The 3rd core was stable up to around 3.8ghz if I remember correctly, whereas the 2 enabled by default were fine up to at least 4.2.

This was Athlon XP era and i believe it allowed unsupported multipliers.

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