Who doesn’t need extra money around the Holidays? At Ebyte.com we not only value your business we LOVE your participation. From December 1st through December 15th you will be entered in a drawing to win a $200 MasterCard gift card for every WikiByte, Comment, Notify Me, Review, or Action Shot posted! Add 10 WikiBytes and get 10 entries. Of course, we love orders too so you will get an entry for every order as well.

Well, it may not be exactly that easy, but AMD is certainly making it easier to increase the performance of their Phenom 8000 series triple-core and 9000 series quad-core processors.

According to TG Daily, AMD Phenom processors include six “hidden pins”, which can enable simple overclocking through your motherboard’s southbridge chip. This can either be done through the bios, a utility program, or by pressing a button on certain motherboards. If your motherboard has an AMD southbridge chip, including the SB600, SB700 and SB750 models, you can easily get a “free” upgrade to a processor running up to 3.2 GHz. That’s a clock speed comparable to the Athlon X2 6400+, AMD’s fastest clocked processor available to date.

Overclockers will be happy to know that Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz Processor has dropped to an all time low of $277.99! (as of the time of this post) This is a serious beast of a processor for under the $300 mark. We’ve seen this processor running stable overclocked at 3.6GHz. So ultimately, you’re able to get a quad core 3.6GHz processor for under $300, which is pretty amazing and good news to anyone looking to build a serious rig for multimedia and gaming without laying down serious cash for an Intel Extreme.

*Please note - overclocking your cpu will probably void your warranty.

And some fries to go with that shake:

• ASUS P5K Deluxe/WiFi-AP Desktop Board
• PNY XLR8 2GB 1066MHz DDR2-1066/PC2-8500 CAS 5 Memory
• BFG TECH GeForce 8800 GTX OC Graphics Card

Checkout this article on bit-tech.net for information on overclocking the Q6600