For testing I will be using the ECS A785GM-AD3 in conjunction with the following hardware. Note that due to the 95W TDP processor limit I couldn't utilize my usual Phenom-II 965 X4 and had to pick up something else instead. Given that ECS touts their "Special ACC" feature to "provide stable unlocking of hidden cores within the AMD processors" I selected a chip that should hopefully allow us to test this.

AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7Ghz
Kingwin XT-1264 HTC Cooler
2x1Gb OCZ Platinum PC3-1333
Seagate 80Gb 7200.7 SATA
NEC 16X DVD+/-RW ATA
XClio 450w Dual +12v PSU
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit


The Sempron 140 is a 45nm 45W single core chip based off the Athlon-II Regor dual core that shares the same 1Mb L2 cache and 4000Mhz Hypertransport. It is basically an Athlon-II X2 with one of the cores disabled. Introduced in July of 2009, this particular processor was purchased retail for this review and is a week 42 of 2009 die, which means it is four months old already. Whether the manufacture date will have any bearing on potential unlocking success will have to be seen.

With everything assembled let's power up and have a look at the BIOS.