Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 132 posts

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#31

Post by xxs »

bell-cot wrote: post #4

Sounds like good* strategy by Intel. Cheap for them & the MB manufacturers to make a few little changes, all the potential issues with Old MB/New CPU systems are now "sorry, not supported", and the Rebel 0.01% can imagine that they've cleverly won a real victory - which "victory" will barely be a rounding error on any of the Big Players' financials. *"Good" by Capitalist Overlord standards

>Rebel 0.01%

Lower than that, much lower - as it required custom built/assembled BIOS, effectively. The hardware mod was the very easy part.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#32

Post by Astronaut3315 »

jsheard wrote: post #13
scrlk wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.

You rarely see those kinds of unlocks anymore unfortunately, since they started using eFuses to disable parts of the chip permanently. It still happens occasionally though, like the time when AMD decided to add a 4GB SKU alongside the originally planned 8GB SKU of one of their graphics cards so late in development that they didn't have time to actually change the hardware, so all of the initial batches had 8GB instal…

Wow, that’s even better than my old PNY GTX 465. It was really a 470 that was cut down by the VBIOS. I was able to download 256MB of VRAM, a wider memory bus and some GPU cores on that one.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#33

Post by accrual »

A couple of historical CPU mods similar to this:

- AMD K6-2+ can be converted to K6-3+ by moving a 0-ohm resistor under the IHS to unlock the full 256K of L2 cache only present on K6-3+ models. The CPUs were basically all the same and were binned into separate SKUs using the position of this resistor.

- AMD K7 (Athlon XP) can be similarly unlocked by bridging conductive pads on the chip using something as common a graphite pencil.

- Intel Pentium 3 Coppermine chips could be run on earlier Pentium 2 boards by using a slotket adapter with a modified socket. The socket could sometimes be further modified to support the signaling used by even later P3 Tualatin chips, allowing for Tualatin CPUs to run on 440BX chipsets which were never designed for them. Also needs a BIOS mod and sometimes a VRM replacement.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#34

Post by stronglikedan »

scrlk wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.

They do just that at the end of the embedded video.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#35

Post by donatj »

What is the financial benefit to Intel in artificially limiting its CPU sockets like this? Logic and reason would have me believe they'd want to sell as many CPUs as possible, and keeping the socket compatible for as long as possible would seem logical.

My thoughts on reasons they might have done this. I honestly have no idea, these are just uninformed guesses.

- The Charitable Answer: There actually is some sort of minor incompatibility like a voltage difference to some pin where it can still boot but it's maybe not good for the CPU?

- The Practical Answer: They make more off the associated sockets/compass direction bridges/etc than they would off increased numbers of CPU upgrades.

- The Cynical Answer: Motherboard manufacturers paid them off

- The Cynical Practical Answer: They have a schedule for socket changes as some sort of deal with motherboard manufacturers and some engineers decided to do so in the laziest way possible

- The Silly Answer: They're an evil corporation and want you to suffer

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#36

Post by grandinj »

donatj wrote: post #35

What is the financial benefit to Intel in artificially limiting its CPU sockets like this? Logic and reason would have me believe they'd want to sell as many CPUs as possible, and keeping the socket compatible for as long as possible would seem logical. My thoughts on reasons they might have done this. I honestly have no idea, these are just uninformed guesses. - The Charitable Answer: There actually is some sort of…

It costs money to validate a new processor on an old motherboard, and no corp wants to waste money on a product they have already sold.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#37

Post by iwontberude »

terlisimo wrote: post #23
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rarely see those kinds of unlocks anymore unfortunately, since they started using eFuses to disable parts of the chip permanently. It still happens occasionally though, like the time when AMD decided to add a 4GB SKU alongside the originally planned 8GB SKU of one of their graphics cards so late in development that they didn't have time to actually change the hardware, so all of the initial batches had 8GB instal…

Honorable mention of ATI Radeon 9600 that was soft-upgradeable (via hacked drivers) to 9800 PRO for a 200% perf boost. Good times.

And NVidia GeForce 6600GS to 6800GT with pencil mod and flash.

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#38

Post by fizzynut »

donatj wrote: post #35

What is the financial benefit to Intel in artificially limiting its CPU sockets like this? Logic and reason would have me believe they'd want to sell as many CPUs as possible, and keeping the socket compatible for as long as possible would seem logical. My thoughts on reasons they might have done this. I honestly have no idea, these are just uninformed guesses. - The Charitable Answer: There actually is some sort of…

Intel basically made the same CPU for about 6 years straight because of 10nm process issues.

They had to keep pretending the next gen "Lake" CPU was substantially different from the last, so they just took last gen product, made some minor tweaks to break compatibility and called it a new generation

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#39

Post by litenboll »

accrual wrote: post #33

A couple of historical CPU mods similar to this: - AMD K6-2+ can be converted to K6-3+ by moving a 0-ohm resistor under the IHS to unlock the full 256K of L2 cache only present on K6-3+ models. The CPUs were basically all the same and were binned into separate SKUs using the position of this resistor. - AMD K7 (Athlon XP) can be similarly unlocked by bridging conductive pads on the chip using something as common a gr…

If anybody else wonders why a 0-ohm resistor is a thing, apparently it is because it makes it possible to install a jumper on printed circuit boards with the same equipment that is used for normal resistors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-ohm_link

Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape

#40

Post by amarcheschi »

xxs wrote: post #31
bell-cot wrote: post #4

Sounds like good* strategy by Intel. Cheap for them & the MB manufacturers to make a few little changes, all the potential issues with Old MB/New CPU systems are now "sorry, not supported", and the Rebel 0.01% can imagine that they've cleverly won a real victory - which "victory" will barely be a rounding error on any of the Big Players' financials. *"Good" by Capitalist Overlord standards

>Rebel 0.01% Lower than that, much lower - as it required custom built/assembled BIOS, effectively. The hardware mod was the very easy part.

I followed a guide to mod my bios (amd tho) to unlock features and with a tutorial is kinda easy... like, just follow the tutorial, open this, change this to that... i don't know however whether it would require a handmade mod for each bios or if a generalist tutorial would be okay for different oems mobos
Post reply on HN