Friday, March 5th 2010
ASRock enables ACC on AMD 8-Series Chipsets to Unlock Disabled Cores
AMD ACC is a feature of the company's 7-Series chipsets which uses a debugging backchannel going from the Southbridge to the processor to change certain CPU aspects, one of them being the "disable cores" feature on modern AMD CPUs. This allows you to play the AMD Casino, go get a cheap triple core, unlock its fourth core and hope it works (it usually does).As you can imagine, AMD is not all excited about this feature being used by most motherboard manufacturerers, so they left out the ACC interface in their 8-Series Southbridge, effectively disabling access to ACC. Now motherboard manufacturers found a solution to circumvent this limitation, they simply add a little chip to the motherboard that enables that functionality by providing its own ACC interface.
ASRock - well known for their price/performance optimized boards - went this route and a bit further. Unlike other solutions the feature can be enabled without a physical switch, ASRock's UCC feature can be controlled directly in the BIOS without any manual intervention by the user.
The option will be available on all their 8-Series motherboards: 890GX Extreme3, 890GMH/USB3, 880GMH/USB3. They also managed to add the same technology to their NVIDIA MCP62 based lineup.
ASRock - well known for their price/performance optimized boards - went this route and a bit further. Unlike other solutions the feature can be enabled without a physical switch, ASRock's UCC feature can be controlled directly in the BIOS without any manual intervention by the user.
The option will be available on all their 8-Series motherboards: 890GX Extreme3, 890GMH/USB3, 880GMH/USB3. They also managed to add the same technology to their NVIDIA MCP62 based lineup.
28 Comments on ASRock enables ACC on AMD 8-Series Chipsets to Unlock Disabled Cores
I tried this today on my in-law's brand new pc, but it wouldn't start up with the 4th core unlocked. No video signal, keyboard not working, nothing. I wonder why there's no easy way to undo the UCC function as easy as it is to activate it! Now i had to go all the way to the "reset bios" jumper and set the right options in the bios again! Never before in my 20+ years' pc experience did i have to do anything drastic like that!
What if my parents in law accidentally press the x key while booting? :(
And seriously, you've been using PC's for 20 years and never cleared the CMOS? thats like saying you've driven a car for 20 years and never put fuel in.
(If you don't get it, click here.)