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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."
..and 'only' some manufacturers ALREADY know how to get around it.
newsflash, some manufactures have not ever supported overclocking of any sort..
so there's a lock, but there isn't? that's the point of this? it's not like you could blindly choose what motherboard to get before if you were going to overclock it since some of them didn't really support it at..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
because people overclock their systems and then try to claim warranty repair. sometimes, the overclocking is done by a middleman who re-labels chips. when the chip melts, the ball falls somewhere between intel and the innocent but bilked customer. this helps cut down on that.
Follow along here. I have a "2600" Athlon, which is really a 2.083 GHz chip, which supposedly takes a 166 MHz FSB. I have lowered the multiplier on the chip, but raised the FSB to 200, since I havd DDR400 memory. No stability issues whatsoever, and various benchmarks report about a 1/5 improvement in memory bandwidth, etc.
I have no real desire to rev the chip higher than spec, in fact, its so damn hot now, I'm thinking about dropping the overall GHz. But its useful to be able to twiddle the multipliers to suit your needs. Thank you AMD, fsck you Intel.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
But rather against merchants that overclock and then sell machines as the next-highest processor. I remember back when Intel first started doing this the company said it wasn't targeting the actions of the end user but rather shady mercahnts.
Intel is also looking to cut down on RMAs. There are a suprising number of asshats that overclock components then attempt to RMA components that fail. Read any overclocking forum or bbs and you find a fair amount of people that have no problem trying to defraud vendors when they burn their chip out from overclocking/overvolting.
Preventing overclocking makes very good sense for Intel.
This move is NOT designed to prevent end-users from overclocking; that is an unfortunate side effect.
The real reason is because often, shady resellers will be Intel chips, overclock and sell them as faster than they really are. When the chips fail (which, if overclocking is widespread, they inevitbly will in some cases), it looks to the end user like Intel makes crappy chips; obviously this is bad for business.
Now accusations of intentionally marking chips down from what their capable of may or may not be true. In some cases that's justified; better safe than sorry for Intel: they'd rather have chips that aren't performing as fast as they possibly could then chips failing because they weren't capable of the level they were marked at.
Then again sometimes this is a sketchy practice.
However, standard pratice is not to round up when labelling speeds. Witness the P2 266, DDR266, etc. Shying away from DDR666 is no more logical than skipping the 13th floor in tall buildings.