Slashdot Mirror
ASUS Secretly Overclocking Motherboards?
Hubert writes "It seems that the motherboard manufacturing industry is getting a little bit too competitive now that ASUS and many other manufacturers are secretly tweaking and overclocking the motherboard in default BIOS settings." A front side bus that's a mere 2 MHz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition.
On the surface, it seems "cool" or a "so what" situation. However, when you're relying on your PC to do real work rather than just trying to eke out a few more fps in a game, random crashes matter. And that's what these kinds of tweaks will cause. And it will be particularly annoying for people who don't know about the "secret tweaks" since they'll immediately suspect things like the memory or the processor before thinking that the motherboard settings are being quietly manipulated without their knowledge. So while this might be neat for my game box, I'd want to know about this "feature" so as not to include such a board on a production workstation or server. Cheers,
Is it really overclocking if the manufacture does it? Isn't it just deciding the default settings? Components aren't made with a built in correct speed - there is a certain speed that going above means you've overclocked it. They decide the level of stability they want and set the components accordingly. All this means is that they've decided that stability is slightly less important in comparision to speed than they had decided previously. It's not overclocking.
"A front side bus that's a mere 2Mhz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition."
People need to learn to read graphs. "Best" is too often judged on speed, to the exclusion of other important factors. And too often, performance graphs in magazines and articles are drawn to exaggerate the differences between the worst-performer and the best performer, when the actual performance difference may be 1% or 2%. In terms of PC performance, neglibible.
But a 2% performance improvement may make the difference between a component or system being labelled as "disappointing" and "out in front" by a lot of dumbed-down magazines and online articles.
If only people were better able to keep a sense or proportion, and view performance tests with a little more intelligence, manufacturers wouldn't be so tempted to pull silly stunts like this one.
> Is this bad, unethical, or in any way illegal? What's the big deal? Why the slashdot story?
What are you, a CEO of some big company?
Why yes it's bad, unethical and likely illegal.
It is bad for various reasons, one of the biggest being that you have a market leader effectively performing unqualified tweaks on the timing of various system board components. I'm fairly certain that Asus isn't doing any chip qualification tests on the components they are overclocking.
It's unethical because they are doing that to receive an unfair advantage in the highly competitive (and extremely bogus) MB performance rankings. MBs differ in performance by extremely small amounts, so a 2MHz difference is plenty to differentiate one board from another (and again, I'm not saying that this has any noticable impact on the performance of your system, other than a 1% increase in some dumb benchmark).
It's likely illegal because when Asus says it has a 400MHz system bus they are not telling the truth. That would be false advertising (I mean heck, the number is written right on the MB boxes).
But the REAL point here that is MOST disturbing is that the poster doesn't think any of this is even worth posting. THAT'S what I find most appalling. Since when is lying to gain a competitive advantage OK? It is NEVER OK.