Intel Graciously Unlocks the Processing Power Your PC Already Has for $50 Fee

Those $50 Intel "Upgrade" Cards from Best Buy unlock latent processing power your computer already has kicking around inside its silicon guts. How nice of them!

As detailed by the folks at, the cards grant you access to software that upgrades the Pentium G6951 processor. It does this by enabling the 1MB of L3 cache and HyperThread support that already exists on the chip. As others have already noted, this isn't an entirely new practice, but that doesn't make it anymore easy to swallow. [ via Engadget]