Sempron 140 to Athlon II x2 4400e CPU Unlock

[DaveLembke]

Was reading into unlocking AMD CPU's and found an interesting article that got me thinking about the Sempron 140 CPU that I have in 2 systems which is included in the test list.

I bought these cheap CPU's ($35 USD each ) a few years ago  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698   for 3 loaner desktop computers that I built with cheap name brand parts. I built these up to offer to loan to clients if I needed to have their system for a length of time and this way they were not stuck without a computer to use. This was popular for a while and people really liked not being without a computer. However when you build computers to not be vulnerable and break, your work eventually slows as it has. So these loaners are not loaned out as much anymore as they were when I had lots of people needing repairs and they are collecting dust and rarely powered up anymore. Also 1 of the 3 computers a client liked so much that they wanted to keep it and so I sold it to them for $220 which was my cost in parts and Windows OS. They weren't a gamer and they just needed a good fast system for e-mail, web content, playing music, and the occasional youtube video. This Sempron 140 single-core 2.7Ghz 45watt CPU is not a bad Cold Blooded CPU for placement with a user with those limited processing power needs and it benchmarks slightly better than a Hot Blooded Pentium D 3.2Ghz dual-core.

However I was looking online to see if an Athlon II x2 215 2.7Ghz CPU that was given to me from a friend who upgraded to a Phenom x3 for $27 and 25% performance gain thru amazon had any info on the web for Over Clocking and Core/Cache Unlocks. I found the article below in which a number of CPUs were tested for Unlock's and surprise surprise the Sempron 140 is in this list as possibly unlocking to a Athlon II x2 4400e.

So I am going to attempt to unlock this Sempron 140 2.7Ghz when I get home from work in the 2 systems I have and if it unlocks, then test it for problems. It would be neat if it unlocks to healthy dual-cores. Yes, its still not as powerful as a modern higher end CPU, but the benchmarks show a good performance gain in getting the other core to fire up..... Hopefully no pun intended with the Fire Up     But if it did destroy the CPU thru this process no big loss. The Athlon II x2 215 will be going into one of them as an upgrade though even if they both unlock.

Anyone else here ever unlock a CPU and if so which CPU and what did it unlock to and what performance gain, as well as if you had any negative experiences with unlocking also share those too?

http://www.overclock.net/t/1126390/how-to-identify-potentially-unlockable-amd-chips

[DaveLembke]

Unable to unlock my Sempron 140 with the Zotac ITX motherboard as seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500045 .

The only ability for a performance boost is to overclock. So I guess you need a better motherboard that has the feature that this board is lacking to try to unlock CPU's.

However since I was in the bios, I did test to see how much of an overclock I could push the Sempron 140 2.7Ghz. And the fastest I could push it was an extra 108 mhz to 2808Mhz via 208Mhz vs 200Mhz FSB x 13.5 (locked) multiplier at 2700Mhz. At 209Mhz FSB the motherboard would fail at POST and state that the setting is bad. At 208Mhz it would boot without any problems. The temp of the CPU also ran very cool at this setting at idle of 36C and when crunching numbers in benchmark after 10 minutes it levelled off at 46C. At native clock of 2.7Ghz the idle was 33C and benchmark after 10 minutes crunching levelled off to 43C.

The slight 3.85% performance gain on this CPU is only noticed when running a benchmark, and the gain is only noticed there in a difference of how fast it was able to calculate to PI before and after etc. * I wouldnt bother overclocking a single-core Sempron.

I ended up swapping out this Sempron 140 2.7Ghz with the Athlon II x2 215 2.7Ghz that was given to me and drastic performance improvement by using this dual-core instead of the single-core.

If I was able to unlock this Sempron 140 to a healthy Athlon II x2 4400e dual-core it would have been nice, but I didnt have the right board to perform this.