Ever heard about the way AMD produce their Sempron™ CPUs? Actually it's DualCore Athlon XIIs, artificially throttled. What the actually do is block a Core and part of the L2 Cache.
Now that I needed a new PC, I've looked into those Semprons and how to unlock the second core. Seems that all (or most, anyway) Boards with an AMD790GX Chipset and an AMD SB750 Southbridge support unlocking those beauties.
Here's the Setup / Cost :
- EUR 30 - AMD Sempron 140 @ Athlon X2 4400e - Boxed (not silent,granted)
- EUR 70 Radeon 5670. Ordered 3 times, all deliveries faulty : got the GDDR3-based card instead of the GDDR5 one. Finally, I give up.
- EUR 35 Any 4 Gigs of DDR2 Ram @ 800MHz.
- EUR 30 Hitachi 500 GB HDD, model HDS721050CLA362.
- EUR 50 LC Power LC6480S power supply (wouldn't wanna miss the cable management)
- EUR 30 Silverstone PS05 case
- EUR 40, used : Asus M3A78-T
As you see, this is not a machine fit for ultimate gaming but a good one for working on and performant enough to even do some serious 3D calculus.
