L3 cache is unlockable on Athlon II X4 620, benchmarks galore
It seems that the ACC intended to improve overclocking on the original AMD Phenoms, is playing new magic tricks again. After it’s ACT 1 which was the unlocking of the disabled cores on the tri-core and dual core Phenom II X3 and X2’s, ACC seems to have found a new puppy to perform ACT 2 on. This time it unlocks the L3 cache on the upcoming Athlon II quad core parts.
AMD Athlon II X4 620 is a quad core part with no L3 cache. It runs at 2.6 GHz comes with a 2MB L2 cache and a TDP of 95W. The CPU is expected to launch in September 2009 along with other CPUs shown in the table below. The price of the Athlon II X2 620 is expected to be around $100-110 judging by this listing. With this fresh news of unlocked L3 cache it makes it a great buy.
It is expected that since the Athlon II 250 (that we recently reviewed here & here) is a native dual core part with die size considerable smaller that Phenom II, the Athlon II X4’s should be native quad cores with no L3 cache. But these fresh reports have given rise to speculation whether the upcoming Athlon II X4’s are salvaged Phenom II’s with disabled L3 cache.
Here are the die shots of the Athlon II X2 (Regor), Athlon II X4 (Propus), Phenom II (Deneb) CPU’s respectively that are floating around the net.
Although the die shot of the Athlon II X4 (Propus) shows the absence of the L3 cache, an enthusiast by the name of ‘chinook’ has been able to unlock the L3 cache on the Athlon II X4 620 and has posted results for everyone to see with the L3 cache locked and unlocked. The CPU-Z validation can be viewed here. The motherboard used is Biostar TA790GX A2+ with 4GB of dual-channel DDR2 memory. The video card used is HD 4670. Note that it’s strange that the year imprinted on the CPU IHS is 2008, and not 2009 as the Athlon II X4’s are being launched in 2009.
Below are the results with unlocked L3 cache results on the left, and locked L3 cache results on the right.
Everest cache and memory
Winrar
SuperPi 1M
SuperPi 32M
WPrime
Cinebench
3dmark Vantage
Source: Inpai, XtremeSystems
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That’s pretty cool – I just bought one of these CPU’s and look forward to unlocking the cache. Thanks a lot for you all your hard work
I noticed as well that my chip was marked 2008 instead of 2009. I have not tried an unlock yet as my mobo has SB700, for now, gonna get a new one to try this out. I did notice something strange though. I loaded memtest86 from an ubuntu live cd and it said my processor was “AMD Opteron (0.13) 2606mhz” but I’m not sure if that would be accurate. I did see this post http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=231697 claiming someone unlocked an athlon ii x2 but again I wonder about the validity of these claims.
Asus m4a785-m with an asus bios update unlocked 6 MB L3 cache on my Athlon IIx4 620 using ACC and unleashing mode. Programs still report Propus label but all show L3 cache and has been stable at 3.0 Ghz for awhile. 3.250Ghz was stable but with stock cooling and 3rd party paste i didnt like the temps IMO, 38-61. 3.0 Ghz keeps temps at 32-53. i assume raising voltage raises temps so i kept all stock voltages the whole time if i remember correctly. If anything i used 1.3v manually at the 3.2 Ghz but like i mentioned i backed it down just to be safe. And as mentioned in every forum/review the CPU must be from a certain batch and the motherboard must be capable of the task.