Free upgrade for my computer!

I was researching my computer's AMD Sempron 140 Sargas processor on Newegg a while back. As I read some comments on the processor I noticed that people have been able to "unlock" a second core on this processor. I purposely bought this processor because it was super cheap even though it only had one core and was thus a little slower. I liked the idea of getting a free second core, so I found out how to do this "unlocking". All you need is a motherboard that had a SB710 or SB750 chip on it and an Advanced Clock Calibration setting in the BIOS.

My super cheap motherboard had the SB710 chip and the setting so I turned it on and found the settings made no sense at all to me. I turned on an "Unleashing Mode" and left it at it's default settings. That sounded like it might unlock something, right? When I restarted my computer it reported that it had an AMD Athalon II X2 4400e processor and it displayed the message "Two Cores Unlocked!!" as it booted. I ran some tests and the processor did indeed seem to have a perfectly fine second core. The only down side I've found is the processor temperatures went up from 38 C to 42 C. Pretty cool to suddenly get double the power for your money.

I wondered what in the world AMD had to gain from this selling more powerful processors but just disabling part of it. I found three reasons that made sense. First, they get tons of free advertising from it. For example I'm blogging about it right now! It might be worth it to spend a little money to get people to talk about your product. Second, they may have just found a obscure problem under extreme conditions with one of the processor cores when they made it so they disabled it and sold it cheaper to cut their losses. Some people have found it doesn't work when they try to unlock extra cores. Third, they may be disabling the processor because people want a cheap single core processor. They could save the costs of building a whole new machine to make this specific processor and just disable one core and sell what people are willing to buy.

The second thing I found out is about NTFS on larger hard drives. I recently erased everything off my computer and reinstalled it to clean things up. I have been sticking to an old file system called FAT32 that came about with Windows 98. When NTFS came out years ago I researched it and everybody said it was terrible, so I stuck with FAT32. It seems now that Microsoft has since improved NTFS and on today's large hard drives it actually runs much faster than the old FAT32. I did some testing and here's what I found.

I have a RAID 0 made with two 40GB SATA hard drives. When it had FAT32 on it it would write at about 45.045 MB/s and read at 57.641 MB/s. I reformatted the drive with NTFS and now it appears to write at 42.024 MB/s and read at 64.776 MB/s. So it takes a little longer to write files but it reads much faster. Since most the waiting on your average computer is for it to read files I'd say it was a nice boost for no cost. Now I'm curious if it would have an effect on my 250GB hard drive, the only problem is my wife uses that hard drive as a networked drive with Mac OS, and I hear that you can't access NTFS with Mac OS. I'll have to look into that further.