Hardware enthusiasts all over the place were thrilled to hear the news, back in February, that triple core AMD processors could be unlocked by some motherboards to gain an extra processing core. But it turns out that the X3's were not the only chips that had the potential for cores being unlocked. 

The AMD Sempron 140 is a low-cost, single-core AMD CPU. Here in Vancouver, it costs about $50. As it turns out, if you have a motherboard that supports the unlocking feature (typically called 'Advanced Clock Calibration' in the BIOS), you can sometimes unlock a second core of the Sempron 140, effectively making it an Athlon II X2.

This trick will not work 100% of the time though, keep in mind. Generally AMD disables cores that aren't working right on the CPU, for the single core Sempron parts. Conceivably though, if they didn't have enough chips in the fab plants that had a dysfunctional core, then they would have to disable working cores on CPUs in order to fill the Sempron production quotas. For those folks out there that this does work for, it is a extremely cheap way to get a 2.7 GHz dual-core processor that also has decent overclocking potential. 

Certainly for those people that know what they are doing, with tricks like this it is possible to build a great gaming computer for only a couple hundred of bucks.