Asus M4A89GTD PRO Unlocks Disabled Phenom II CPU Cores

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Asus M4A89GTD PRO Unlocks Disabled Phenom II CPU Cores

Earlier this week ASUS introduced two new AMD 890GX based motherboards the M4A89GTD PRO and the M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, two boards that in and of themselves are seemingly two more great additions to the ASUS line-up. These particular boards however offers a slight advantage over some of the other boards on the market. They come with the ability to "unlock," or enable processor cores that were originally disabled by AMD.

Core unlocking is nothing new, in fact we reported early last year that with the right motherboard you could Turn Your Phenom II X3 Core Into A Quad Core. AMD however pressured motherboard manufactures to block the feature by adding a new microcode in the companies motherboard BIOS updates. With the new updated bios gone was the ability to make your lower prices CPU run like its much more expensive counter part.

The ASUS M4A89GTD PRO and M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 are the first boards to officially offer a "Core Unlocker" switch on the motherboard, turning select processors into triple or quad core CPU. ASUS's Core Unlocker simplifies the activation of a latent AMD CPUs. User can toggle the switch, turn on the disabled cores and enjoy an instant performance boost by simply unlocking the extra cores, without performing complicated BIOS changes. Asus has said, "Not all processors are supported nor will all supported processors operate correctly with unlocked cores." Asus did not say which processors the Core Unlocker feature would support.

ASUS M4A89GTD-PRO Reviews