11 DIY PROJECTS TO UNLEASH YOUR GEAR'S HIDDEN POWER—FOR FREE!

practices that distinguish true power users from common folk. System building is one. Component benchmarking certainly applies. As does religious parts swapping. And then, of course, there's hardware hacking. Hacking, more than anything else, exemplifies our ongoing quest for more—more performance, more functionality, more power—because we're wringing this extra goodness from gear we already own, using crafty methods and occasionally pushing the bounds of practicality in the pro cess; sometimes just for the heck (or should we say hack?} of it.

We know that GPUs and CPUs often have features disabled or dialed back in order to fit a price point. We'll showyou some nifty ways to access their hidden capabilities, as well as some fixes for inherent flaws. We also know that our gear can be made to do more than it was intended to with the help of third-party software, as you'll discover inourwebcamandRokuprojects.Andifyouwanttomakeyoursmartphone smarter, increase your Wi-Fi router's range, or RAID your SSDs, we'll turn you on to those tricks, too.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s get hacking!

 

OVERCLOCK AMD BULLDOZER

After years of AMD hyping the Bulldozer mi­croarchitecture for its supposed efficiencies, the initial batch of Bulldozer-based AMD FX Series processors arrived with a resounding thud due to disappointing performance and relatively high power consumption. But amid all the fervor following the launch, many en­thusiasts seem to have missed the fact that AMD's then-flagship FX-8150 was technically the fastest desktop processor the company had released to date. Of course, being the fastest processor in AMD's line-up at the time didn't mean there wasn't some frequency headroom left under the hood. It turns out that the Bulldozer-based AMD FX-8150 is a pretty decent overclocker.

We all saw the reports of AMD's Bulldozer breaking overclocking records and earn-

The AMD OverDrive real-time overclocking and system-monitoring utility is a great tool for tweaking the performance of a Bulldozer-based system when used in conjunction with the right motherboard.

ing a place in the Guinness World Records. But those overclocks were performed with liquid-helium cooling, binned chips, extreme voltages, and only a single Bulldozer module (two cores] enabled. Overclocking a retail- ready processor with all of its cores enabled using more traditional cooling methods is a different story altogether. Luckily, not much has changed with Bulldozer in the overclock­ing department; the tried and true methods of tweaking multipliers, voltages, and the Hy- perTransport clock that worked with the Phe- nom II carry over to Bulldozer, as well.

We set out to see what kind of overclocks were possible with an AMD FX-8150 using a standard air-cooler and an AMD 990FX- based Asus motherboard. Instead of using the motherboard's UEFI/BISO to overclock, though, we turned to AMD's OverDrive util­ity, which lets users overclock from within Windows in real-time without having to re­boot and waste time constantly restarting a system.

Because FX Series processors are “un­locked," their multipliers can be raised or lowered to increase or decrease the CPU fre­quency at will. Increasing or decreasing the HT clock has the same effect, and pumping more voltage into a chip will typically allow for higher frequencies, as well, provided it is adequately cooled.

The FX-8150 has a base clock of 3.6GHz, which will dip down to 1.4GHz while idling. When half (or fewer] of its cores are being uti­lized, the FX-8150 is able to Turbo up to a peak frequency of 4.2GHz. When all of its cores are being fully utilized, the FX-8150 can Turbo up to 3.9GHz. And while all of this is happening, the processor's voltage will fluctuate be­tween approximately ,85v and 1.36v. By disabling Turbo, turning the voltage up beyond 1.4-v, and cranking up the CPU multiplier with AMD's OverDrive utility, all of the cores on the chip can run at even faster speeds and offer much better overall performance.

How much faster the FX-8150 will run varies from chip to chip, but we found that at 1.4125v, our CPU could reliably hit 4.41GHz (22x multiplier x 200MHz HT clock]. At fre­quencies any higher at that voltage, the test bed was unstable, and pumping upwards of 1.5v into a 32nm chip with air cooling isn't ideal. To hit 4.41GHz, we simply launched OverDrive, chose Advanced mode, disabled Turbo, and moved the CPU multiplier and voltage sliders as necessary. Please note that the CPU settings in your BIOS/UEFI should be set to Auto should you want to experiment with OverDrive.

When running at 4.41GHz, the FX-8150 of­fered up a Cinebench R11.5 score of 7.31, an increase of 1.3 points, or 21.6 percent, over the stock score of 6.01. And its temperature peaked at only 71 C.That kind of performance boost won't allow the FX-8150 to overtake many of Intel's faster chips, but it's a huge gain nonetheless and one that's easily ob­tained using the OverDrive software.

RAID CURE UNLOCKING: UNLEH5H DDRDIHNT CPU CDRE5

in the early stage of a processor architec­ture’s lifetime, it is common for multicore dies with nonfunctional cores to be har­vested for use in lower-end products, while fully functional dies end up at the high-end. Overtime, however, as manufacturing pro­cesses mature and yield increases, there are fewer and fewer dies with nonfunctional elements to harvest. If there is still demand for lower-cost processors, though, in lieu of expending engineering resources design­ing a new, cheaper-to-produce core, chip makers like AMD will often disable perfect­

ly good cores in an existing CPU design to satiate the market.

Such is the case with a number of chips in AMD's aging Phenom II product line. After years in production, yields are high on quad- core versions of the chip, but there is still a relatively large demand for cheaper, dual- and triple-core Phenom II processors. As such, many of those dual- and triple-core chips have additional cores on-die that are functional, but dormant. Manufacturers of enthusiast class motherboards, however, have devised BIOS/UEFI-level tricks to un

lock those cores and turn cheap processors into something much more powerful.

Unlocking cores is very easy, provided you've got the right CPU and motherboard combo. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and other motherboard makers all offer Socket AM3/ AM3+ boards with core unlocking capabili­ties (the boards require a SB7xO or newer south bridge with Advanced Clock Calibra­tion). As for the processors, many Phenom II X2, Phenom II X3, and Athlon II X3 chips are unlockable. Although not guaranteed, processors from newer batches should

have no trouble being unlocked. If you’ve got one of these processors, do a quick search to see if others have had success with it—most likely they have.

To actually perform the unlock requires nothing more than entering the BIOS/UEFI, heading into the Advanced CPU configura­tion menu and enabling Core Unlocking or ACC lor whatever the motherboard manu­facturer has called the setting). Keep in mind, though, should your chip unlock with­out incident, it may require increased cool­ing to deal with the additional active cores.

A simple flip of a switch within the Asus CrossHair V Formula motherboard’s UEFI can unlock dormant cores on some AMD dual- and triple-core processors, resulting in significant multithreaded performance improvements.

OVERCLOCK INTEL SANDY BRIDGE-E

Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E is a beast of a micro­architecture. It takes many of the good things about the already awesome Sandy Bridge and vastly expands upon them. Whereas Sandy Bridge-based processors sport up to four cores, 16 lanes of integrated PCIe 2.0 connec­tivity, dual-channel memory controllers, and 8MB of shared L3 cache, Sandy Bridge-E fea­tures eight cores, AO lanes of PCIe 3.0-class connectivity, quad-channel memory, and up to 20MB of shared L3. We should point out, though, that current SNB-E based desktop processors have only four or six cores en­abled and up to 15MB of shared L3.

The sum of SNB-E’s parts results is that it’s still one of the fastest desktop processors Intel has released to date. Of course, there's always some room for improvement with a little overclocking. Unfortunately, SNB-E inherited one of SNB’s undesirable traits, as well—a finicky BCLK, or base clock. Like original Sandy Bridge-based parts, Sandy Bridge-E processors offer limited flexibility for overclocking when using BCLK manipula­tion. Users who want to alter CPU and memo­ry frequencies via the BCLK are limited to just a few MHz in either direction (approximately

3-5MHz|. With Sandy Bridge-E, however, two new BCLK multiples [125MHz and 166MHz) are also available that were not with Sandy Bridge, so there is some fun to be had there. Like K-Series SKUs, though, Core i7 Extreme Editions are fully unlocked, meaning CPU, Turbo, and memory clocks can all be adjusted by using different multipliers.

When overclocking SNB-E chips, power and cooling considerations are paramount. Running at its stock 3.3-3.9GHz speeds, the Core i7-3960X is rated for 130W TDP, but power consumption and heat output increase

substantially when the chip is overclocked. With that in mind, Intel and its motherboard partners have incorporated options to dy­namically increase voltages when necessary and specify peak current thresholds. These new options and SNB-E’s more demand­ing power and heat considerations make the overclocking process somewhat more complex, but if you don’t feel like tinkering much and have a good cooler and PSU, play­ing with voltages and multipliers are all that is necessary to achieve some monster over­clocks with SNB-E. We should also point out that although options are available to disable SpeedStep and various C states, overclock­ing SNB-E only requires finding the right combination of BCLK, voltage, and maximum Turbo frequencies. By altering those options alone and not messing with SpeedStep or C states, the processor can still throttle down while idle to minimize power consumption and temperatures.

To give you some examples, most SNB- E-based processors can achieve 4.5GHz with decent airor liquid cooling. A large per­centage of the chips can do 4.6GHz to 4.7GHz with minimal effort, and 4.8GHz should be doable with the right voltage (1.4v to 1.5v] and high-end cooling. 5GHz-plus should also be possible with select chips and more exotic cooling.

We did some overclocking with a Core i7- 3960X Extreme Edition processor and Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooler with the excellent UEFI utility on the Asus P9X79 Deluxe mother­board and were able to push our particular chip to 4.75GHz. We achieved that speed using a 125MHz BCLK strap and a peak all-core Turbo multiplier of 38 (125MHz x 38) with a peak volt­age of 1.425v. At that speed and voltage, how­

ever, we were pushing the limits of the cooler— the processor would approach the 90 C mark after extended periods of sustained load, and at 91 C, SNB-E-based chips will begin to throttle.

With the processor overclocked to 4.75GHz, the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition's Cinebench 11.5 score jumped from 10.51 (stock frequencies] to 13.99 (overclocked fre­quency], an increase of 33.1 percent. Not a bad performance boost for simply altering a few settings in our motherboard’s UEFI utility.

The UEFI utility on Asus’ P9X79 Deluxe motherboard allowed us to take our Sandy Bridge-E based Core i7-3960X to 4.75GHz by altering only a few options in the Ai Tweaker menu