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Unlocking Troubles

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Superbgear

New Member
Joined
Jan 4, 2011
So I have a Sempron 140 and Biostar TA785G3 motherboard but I am unable to proceed with unlocking the second core of the Sempron.

The board is a revision 6.1 and I have flashed it to the latest bios from the Biostar website which specifically states unlocking being enabled. However, when I boot up and hit F6, nothing happens. Also, in the "CPU Configuration" page in the bios, I am not seeing a "C1E Support" or "Advanced Clock Calibration" entry as I believe I should be. Underneath the "ACPI SRAT Table" option is "Core Leveling" and that is it.

So my question is, does the issue here lie with the CPU or the motherboard? Or perhaps I am missing something entirely here?

Wondering if anybody with more experience with AMD boards and ACC could help me out as this is my first AMD build.
 
Your Model is not supposed to Unlock it seems...

Nosed around. YMMV.

Customer Reviews of the Biostar TA785G3 at NewEgg.

Rating: 3/5Biostar won't replace boards to enable ACC (unlocking)
Pros: Nice board, got it as part of a combo, but not from Newegg. Got ver 6.1. - had no issues setting it up with Phenom X2 II 555 processor (but it turned out Antec 430W earthwatts v.2.2 PSU was not sufficient to boot the combo - solved by upgrading to 500W generic PSU.). Liked power and reset buttons on the board - convenient.

Cons: Biostar's website claims that unlocking is possible with the latest bios (dated 4/21/10). I've updated the bios, but the board hangs when I try to enable ACC. The combo processor unlocked on different boards (Gigabyte 790XTA-UD4 and MSI 785GTM-E45). Upon reading a review here about how Biostar performed a hardware upgrade in a similar, emailed them a question about the procedure Friday. The following I received in return yesterday: "Unfortunately, we no longer have any version 6.4 motherboards available for trade." I'm disappointed with Biostar's handling of this matter in my case and will likely sell this motherboard to someone who does not need ACC feature.

Other Thoughts: Because Newegg typically doesn't guarantee a particular version/revision of the product, I would abstain from purchasing this board if you need/want to try unlocking extra cores of your processor, since Biostar will not replace your board with a newer version that supports ACC. However, if your processor has all cores enabled already, it's a nice board.

From Rebels Haven Forums.

Post #1 >> Now i have a question for you guys, when i ordered my mainboard a asked for rev 6.3 but instead i got 6.0. I saw on the biostar page that bio-unlocking works with 6.3 only so what are differences between 6.0 and 6.3?. I already unlocked the cpu but im just curious.

Post #2 >> I don't know what changes there are between board revisions, but I'd guess that they would be slight. Apparently it's not enough to make a difference in your case.

Post #3 >> Hey Prodigy Freak,

I too have the TA785G3 board Rev 6.0 and I encountered a strange problem. I updated my BIOS in an attempt to cure a slow access time on my Samsung F3 1TB and when I did, I lost the ACC function in my BIOS. I tried all 3 of the BIOS files listed here for our board:

http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/mb/bios.php?S_ID=436

However, each and every BIOS listed did not provide the ACC function. After much trial and error and searching, I finally stumbled upon this page:

http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/event/biounlocking/features.htm

If you click on the Models tab it will take you to a page with the 785G, 770, and 760G chipet boards and their respective BIO-unlocKING BIOS files. I updated to this BIOS for my board and all is well again.

So, to sum it up, it seems our boards may come preflashed with this BIOS and may not.
 
From what I've found on the web, it seems that all versions of the board support unlocking with the correct bios. (The Biostar website even says so and gives the bios downloads.)

After flashing to the new BIOS, I noticed the "Core Leveling" option which was not there before. However I'm not sure if this means my board is now capable to unlock or not because option to enable ACC is not there. So what I specifically want to know is if the ACC function appearing in the BIOS depends on the CPU being able to unlock or not.

Would appreciate if someone with a similar/same board clarify this for me.
 
Yup :) It is a Athlon II x2 with a core disabled

There are quite a few hits when gOOgling unlocked Sempron 140, so the good ones without a bad core will unlock.

Don't own the board since I have plenty without another, but the link in post #2 above shows what Biostar intends for unlocking with their "later" bioses. They seem by intent to no-longer show visible ACC functions in bios and say that at boot-up F3 will unlock 3rd core and F4 at boot-up will unlock the fourth core.

Originally there was no intent to unlock the cpus on boards not Rev 6.3 or above but apparently they did release an 'unlocking' bios for the Rev 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 motherboards and at their download site is called 88GAP421.BST. It is described thusly >> Description Support F6 unlcoKING function. Most likely it means that the F6 key plays greatly in unlocking any Cpu on any board using the 88GAP421.BST bios version. Based on Biostars instructions to use the F3 and F4 key at bootup for unlocking, my suspicion is that F6 unlocks with bios 88GAP421.BST on boards made for that bios and core-leveling disables the bad cores. ACC will not be visible in ''unlocking'' bioses but only in bioses previous to their famed ''unlocking'' bioses according to Biostar website informationals.
 
Yup :) It is a Athlon II x2 with a core disabled

Hmm... Well, that's news to me.

I thought they were still making Semprons' and Athlons' like how they used to back in the S754/939 days when they were different chips, hadn't realized that the Semprons were now Athlons just operating under a different name and less default cores.
 
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