You had to win the silicone lottery to do so though. Or the supply and demand lottery, I guess. Tri core CPUs started as quad core silicon where one of the cores was damaged during manufacturing, but as the manufacturing got better they started having fewer mistakes and started supplying the price bracket with perfectly working quads with one core disabled.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
the 290 to 290x situation was basically the same. You had to get a cpu/gpu that was fully working, but artificially limited to to provide for the numbers of the lower tier product due to demand. with all of the unlockable chips, its was very specific time windows where it was possible to get a functional one.