The days of creating a resistor bridge with a pencil to enable extra cores and altering the multiplier are long gone. I still remember pushing my duron with a massive aluminium block on top of it getting 100+mhz more out of it.
I remember when you could enable cores in a GPU just by flashing a different firmware.
Wasn't there a time when you could flash a GeForce to a Quadro and you'd lose some performance in gaming but you gain floating point precision for rendering? Or was this a rumor?