Intel Puts the Lock on Overclocking

Patrick Schmid writes "Intel included an overclocking-prevention mechanism into the 915/925 chipsets. So far, only Asus and Gigabyte know how to override it. You can start from the beginning or jump to where we discuss the overclocking lockout."

Comments

Market Share

[drsmack1]

Do these sorts of things hurt their business? I wonder how many would not buy into Intle knowing that there are these sorts of things built in? I imagine that the big corps don't care.

Re:Market Share

[Supp0rtLinux]

Remember... all the big OEMs are pushing the high-end gaming systems to the "new breed of computer users". Just as there's a resurgence in IT spending, there's a new breed of home PC user that doesn't mind paying $3000+ for a high-end system. No, corporate America doesn't give a rip about overclocking cause they care about their warranties. But there's a growing group that does... and choices like this make them turn to AMD. AMD has better, cheaper 64bit support. And they still make overclocking easier. Intel is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Funny... you'd think Intel would learn from Microsoft's example instead of repeating the same mistakes...

Re:Market Share

[lukewarmfusion]

No, these help their business. The percentage of people that overclock their machines is probably very small. However, the people that are willing to spend money upgrading their hardware are much more common. So Intel capitalizes on the fact that more people are willing to spend money on upgrades than to overclock.

Very few people will "not buy into" Intel because there are mechanisms like this in place... because most people don't know that overclocking exists, and many of the people who do aren't going to overclock anyway. No loss for Intel.

So now I can't burn out my processor?

[Trigun]

Sounds fair. Now if only Intel would agree to not abuse this by artificially locking processors to manipulate market prices.

I can hope.

Anything to make a buck...

[Supp0rtLinux]

Sure... wouldn't want to be able to overclock easily... gotta make us upgrade to the next, best, faster CPU. Maybe if AMD stops gaining market share from Intel, Intel will lighten up on those of us that want to overclock.

Over Clocking is over Rated

[Captain BooBoo]

I have been over clocking since the 486 SX and I can say its all just a fun game. You will NEVER have the stability and it just does not make sense to do any more. If you can't aford to buy a chip fast enough to do whatever job you need it to do then you need to rethink what you're doing. Granted it was "fun" and "neat" to put one over on the chip makers but in the end its all just meh.

Re:Over Clocking is over Rated

[swv3752]

Especially now when the real world performance gain is just not there. When overclocking a 300mhz chip to 500mhz gave significant performance boost. Now that we have Ghz+ chips and squeezing another 100mhz gives a few percentage point points more performance. So now it will take 1 second less time to encode an mp3 or mpeg? I know have to take superhuman steps to cool the processor. I'll stick with stock speeds and have a quieter PC to boot thanks.

Re:Over Clocking is over Rated

[Billobob]

Thats just flat out wrong. My friend purchased one of the athlon XP-2500 mobiles for ~$90 a couple months ago (stock at 1.83 ghz), and managed to overclock it to 2.6ghz with the same stability as the processor is stock, and nearly 800mhz is nothing to scoff at - it managed to be the small advantage he needed to run UT2K4 in 1600x1200 smoothly, and improved multitasking slightly. If its just for home use, then overclocking is a fun crapshoot - sometimes its a bust, but often you can gain a significant improvement out of your processor. Of course nobody would overclock any system that requires total stability and 24/7 uptime, but for your typical home PC a little experimenting couldn't hurt as long as you know what you are doing.

Support

[rsilvergun]

The problem with overclocking is support. That "new breed of computer users" are idiots. Now that overclocking can be done in the software on most computers, it's accessible to people who don't know better than to kick the speed up 2x. Remember people who would run the Add New Hardware Wizard in Windows 95 to add stuff they didn't have? These are the people Intel is afraid of (and rightly so).

Yeah, they're not supported, and they don't get warranty support. But that's not gonna stop them from getting mad at Dell/Gateway/etc when they won't replace the CPU they fried (remember, these people are dumb). Their attitude is likely to be: "if it was going to break the computer, why'd you let me do it?".

Also, Intel's interested in making installing a new processor as easy as possible, which means idiot proofing the things. If you can't overclock it, that's one less way to fry it. Again, fewer support calls, fewer stupidly angry customers.