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Intel Puts the Lock on Overclocking

Posted by michael on from the stop-in-the-name-of-love dept.

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."

1 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. It makes very good sense by PJamFan241 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.