Got MORE than what I paid for?

Short story:
About 2 months ago I bought a Compaq R3000Z notebook for my gfriend. It was supposed to come with an Athlon XP-M 2800+ @1.6GHz, but it is showing up as a 64-bit Athlon estimated at 2800+.


Detail:
I was looking in System Information, and it said that the proc was running at ~797 MHz, which seemed too low to me. This number didn't change even when I ran a bunch of other programs and heard the fan (and presumably the processor) throttle up.

I downloaded Sisoft SANDRA, and it said that my CPU is an Athlon 64 estimated at 2800+!! [8D] I was shocked.

Wondering if the CPU was incorrectly identified, I checked the motherboard. Sure enough, it was reported as "Nvidia Corporation nForce3". I also downloaded CPU-Z, which reported the chip as an Athlon 64-bit processor.


Question:
It seems like a stretch to think this could be the case, but are
there known issues with XP-M processors that could trick software into identifying them as a 64-bit proc? Or could it be that I got more than I paid for, for the first time in my life?

 

Interesting. AFAIK 2800+ M that HP uses is actually the Athlon64, which has most of the 1MB onboard cash disabled (these versions of CPU were made by specifc request from HP). What is your L2 cash size? : if 256K than it is the truncated version. 64 will have 1 MB.

 

OK, I did more research. It looks like the XP-M is based on the same architecture as the Athlon-64, but unable to execute the 64-bit instructions. Perhaps this is why some CPU ID programs think it is 64-bit? Can anyone confirm?

 

It is 256K version. (128 + 56 + 56).

Since you used the word "disabled", I'm wondering if the chip actually has the extra cache on board (kinda like some of the ATI Radeon 9800 chips/boards actually had the extra pipelines that would make them 9800 pros).

The next thing I wonder is if someone will come up with a bios mod or driver mod that will enable all the disabled stuff (like they eventually did for the 9800 -> 9800 pro video cards).