If you bought a janky Compaq at Best Buy recently you may have been offered a $50 “upgrade” card that allows you to download software that will unlock threads and cache on the Pentium G6951 inside your PC. That’s right: they are selling an upgrade that is actually a key to unlock performance that your PC already has. Internet firestorm in 3…2…1… The chip in question has 1MB of cache and is fairly underpowered in the first place. As Engadget notes, the process of locking portions of a chip is fairly common but it usually happens because that area is defective on manufacture. This, however, is something completely different: you are paying an extra half a c-note to use the full power of your processor unhindered by what amounts to DRM. Read more… 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7Authors: John Biggs