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Intel Offers Protection Plan For Overclockers
MojoKid writes "Intel today unveiled a pilot program that provides warranty protection to overclockers in the event they get a little bit overzealous with pushing the pedal to the metal. For a fee, Intel will provide a one-time replacement of certain processors that are damaged by overclocking and/or over-volting. It's completely optional and in addition to the original three-year standard warranty that already applies to Intel's retail boxed processors. Intel isn't yet ready to flat-out endorse overclocking but the Santa Clara chip maker is perfectly content to provide a 'limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking,' for a modest fee, of course. The deal applies only to certain Extreme Edition and K-series (unlocked) processors currently, in Intel's Core i7 and Core i5 families."
Never thought I'd see intel go for something like this, although I don't bother with overclocking these days.
from TFA, since the summary neglected it:
Processors in which you can purchase a Protection Plan include:
Intel Core i7 3960X: $35
Intel Core i7 3930K: $35
Intel Core i7 2700K: $25
Intel Core i7 2600K: $25
Intel Core i5 2500K: $20
Seems fairly affordable if you plan on burning one up, I suppose.
Really? As apposed to offering nothing?
How often do CPUs can fried by overclocking these days?
Modern CPUs have complicated temperature monitoring onboard that will throttle down the chip if it starts to overheat. Shouldn't this protect against 99% of possible damage scenarios?
Who are the folks buying high-end processors? Us! Ppl who know their OC business. This is no loss and all gain for Intel in a product category whose ability to differentiate is practically nil for the target savvy audience. Good on them for throwing us a worthwhile promotional bone.
So this is like gravy on the gravy train that's sailing on a gravy boat floating on an ocean of gravy.
Only one thing doesn't make sense...who puts a train on a boat?
Seriously though, the top-end CPU's are way out of a sane budget for their performance, so Intel can probably afford a number of replacements if they get the sales boost out of it from people who don't know any better anyway.
Not all CPUs are suitable for overclocking. If they tested a chip at the factory and know that it won't survive if run at a higher voltage or clock speed than it is required too it would be bad practice for them to encourage you to operate the chip in a manner that will make it unstable, which could at best cost a bit of time and money when the chip fails, or worse cost you a massive amount of time when the chip operates poorly and causes intermittent failures or incorrect calculations.
Intel are
Intel = singular
are = plural
With the performance of today's processors, I really don't see any reason to overclock beyond "my clocks are bigger then yours".
Overclocking is a great way to ruin perfectly good hardware that costs a pretty penny to begin with.
Undervolting, underclocking, that I can get behind. Less power consumed, less heat produced, lower energy bills.
When my cheap AMD Quad Core can handle HD Multimedia encoding in a decent length of time, why push it beyond it's capacity for a few seconds, minutes off of that time? For a production studeo, sure, but for a home user? get real.
Collective nouns!
It's a pleasant surprise that Intel is offering this option at all, and you're calling them assholes because they're not offering it for all CPU's? I bet you're also pissed that this optional protection plan isn't free either. You arrogant, entitled jackass.
All in all it's hard to fry a modern processor. Probably some time back they put fuses in the processors just in case of short circuit since then know people overclock them. It's probably sophisticated enough now that they can actually recycle the processors. Simply tear down the package and replace the micro fuses and install in a new package. They might even rely on this mechanism in their processor testing and slotting. So if they are already recycling processors with blown fuses why not insure extreme edition processors as well for a little extra. What they insure the processors for covers the costs probably but it makes buying and overclocking the expensive premium extreme edition a little less scary for those that might put down the money.
mcavic = person who seeks confirmation in odd ways
I'm offering you my middle finger. Am I a generous and good guy now?
That depends: do I get to keep it?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
At least I'm posting under my name.
Because other CPUs are not unlocked and therefore not very good for overclocking.
I've seen way more of your bullshit than anti-microsoft bullshit.
Come to think of it though, I HAVE seen a great deal of PRO-Microsoft bullshit lately so perhaps he has a point.
People being paid to push a viewpoint can afford to haunt /. to make their owners point.
you are posting AC to criticize posting AC?
YOUR head should asplode from the idiocy.
The unlocked chips are sold at a premium and are with a sold to the overclockers,
Personally I'm an AMD guy unless performance requirements justify the extra $ but I think it's excellent that Intel is extending real support to the overclockers, they are after all the "bleeding edge" of enthusiasts.
No, but for a fee, Intel will provide a one-time replacement of certain fingers that are damaged by overclocking and/or overvolting. It's completely optional and in addition to the original three-year standard warranty that already applies to Intel's retail boxed fingers. Intel isn't yet ready to flat-out endorse overclocking but the Santa Clara digit maker is perfectly content to provide a "limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking," for a modest fee, of course. The deal applies to only to certain Extreme Edition and K-series (unlocked) fingers currently, in Intel's middle and ring families.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Thats a strange name you have!
A limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking, for a modest fee.
Just how limited is this remedy? For this modest fee, do they send an engineer in a bunny suit to your home/office to laugh at you and suggest that you not do that again?
Or, your definition of the word "name" is too tight.
Not everyone who reads slashdot posts often enough to bother registering. Why should that matter?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
This is Slashdot. The place where Maxtor drives are awesome, even though they die by the thousand, just like Seagate, Hitatchi, IBM (back in the day), speaking of back in the day, does anyone remember Connor?
Uh, right. Where was I?
Anyhow, everything sucks!
Or rather, with manufacturers of everything producing at such volume, one should surely take all claims of durability or lack thereof with a grain of salt. No matter what you're discussing, you will find no shortage of people who have had no problems with a brand, and no shortage of people who had problems with every product they've purchased from said brand.
In general, it doesn't matter. I posted as AC for a while when I was new. But if you're going to go off on someone for not giving away more free stuff, maybe you should be held accountable for your words. When I make a comment like that I usually get called out on it.
But anyway, this is just a friendly banter. I'm not upset.
This is just Intel jumping on the "extended warranty" bandwagon. "Extended warranty" always means gigantic profits for the guy selling the extended warranty.
Ever notice how hard they push extended warranties at the electronics and computer stores? There's a good reason, there's a huge profit margin in them. I bet they pay out $1 for every $20 they take in.
Only chumps buy the extended warranty. Maybe this is a sign... overclockers are chumps?
Do you buy this "insurance plan" in advance, just in case? Or wait until you fry your processor then sign up quick and make a claim? How will Intel know?
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
do you want to over clock? I have pushed machines hard and I found that once we hit dual cores @ 2g things ran just fine;I had no need to overclock a machine since.The hardware is fine now,lets get the wetware up to par.
It is also probable that the magnitude of the additional fee required for Intel to offer this service without losing money would vary sharply between processor families.
The EE and K-series stuff is, shall we say, 'priced for the price insensitive'. Nothing wrong with that, voluntary on both sides, everybody knows that you can get 80-90% of the bang for less than half the buck by stepping back a few notches; but those parts are crazy overpriced. By contrast, their low end parts(especially in areas where they are going directly against AMD largely on basis of performance/$) aren't sold at a loss; but don't have nearly as much profit built in.
If they wanted to offer abuse insurance on value SKUs, and not lose money, the price would likely be a fair percentage of the OEM price of the CPU(very little margin on those parts, and only crazed overclockers would buy the insurance, so a high-risk pool and parts whose cost to intel is not so very different from their cost in store). Offering abuse insurance on the 'because we can' SKUs could be done at a much lower percentage of the OEM price of the CPU, because the cost to intel of that part is much lower than its price, and the entire market for those is crazed overclockers, so the additional riskiness implied by actually buying such insurance is not as great...
Who does still overclock?
I will never buy a used PC.
and they will change the socket or some stuff so you have buy a new MB + maybe new ram as well.
Agreed. /.ers do not need to be handheld to see any bias from the mods: that's what the meta-mod system is for. If there is any bias, it will be accounted for and nuked.
However, these consistent first posts from Anonymous Cowards with off-topic discussions is a source of annoyance. Perhaps he thinks he is doing the rest of us a public service; he is not.
I am John Hurt.
I've read several times that Intel CPUs cost a little over $30 to manufacture, so don't think of Intel as Maecenas. Of course, they are lowering their profits by doing this, but they also give a lot more people the incentive and opportunity to overclock without fearing consequences like burnt $1000 CPUs.
There is absolutely no way anyone can justify OC'ing with today's hardware. Back when you could squeeze 50 - 100 MHz out of a CPU, that's a bit different. Today there is really no need to unless you have older hardware and are trying to avoid a pricey upgrade.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Maybe some of us post AC because we're sick of getting modded into oblivion for defying the /. groupthink, getting negative karma, and then having all our posts default at -1.
Because, from Intel's POV, you're not supposed to overclock CPUs that they could not sell for more, despite being essentially the same silicon but just didn't pass all the tests well, so it had to be downstepped. It might work with OC, it might not, but in any case Intel would be very stupid (or you would be, depends) to offer that kind of protection for CPUs that are not the peak performers of their line. They have to sell you a chip that would rate at X GHz with Y cores for Z money if everything worked flawlessly, but it didn't, so they have to sell you a chip for X-x GHz with Y-y cores for Z-z money (x, y, z >=0). If you could now undo x and y, they'd either have to charge z (which would mean that you end up with a plus/minus of zero), less than z (which would be stupid on their side because you'd get the same CPU cheaper) or more than z (which would be stupid on your side since you'd buy insurance you wouldn't need if you bought the "good" CPU in the first place).
If they now sell you their top notch CPUs with OC insurance, they not only get some additional dough (rest assured that they calculated VERY exactly how to make money that way, too. Insurance is a numbers game, not a gamble), they can also boast the fastest CPUs in various e-peen benchmark tests people run and upload to comparison pages, plus your rather expensive CPUs most likely won't last as long as they would have without OC.
I hope whoever came up with this brilliant idea got his fair share, that's a million dollar PR idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because the CPUs that are being overclocked may have defective microcode and the replacements may contain an updated design
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Yeah I read the summary. What is wrong with you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Either my humour is not understood (oi moi) or you have just made a very cruel assessment of Intel's products, in which case I salute you.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I work in "IC device reliability": this is people who figure out how long an individual transistor will last at normal operating conditions which you need to know because you don't want all your microprocessors, etc. sold to sudden fail 3 years out due to end-of-life failure unexpectedly. You want them to fail one day after your warranty period of course! Then it's someone else's problem.
So how do we predict the future short of waiting a long time? We accelerate the aging process with over-voltage and heat, and measure how long it takes to fail. Then you can apply various techniques to extrapolate that back to normal operating conditions. It's actually surprisingly accurate.
So how long will devices last on the latest 20-30 nm process at normal operating conditions (never mind over-clocking)? Right now the target that processes can expect and thus design for is 10-15 years. Not so bad you say. Well strictly correct because the processor will likely cease to be useful long before this. However, as process nodes have shrunk, this lifetime has monotonically declined. 40 years ago, you could comfortably expect 1,000-5,000 years lifetime at larger geometries. As we shrink that 10-15 year span will shrink also and at an increasing rate now.
So what Intel is doing is basically playing on this to make a buck (they are very good at these kinds of games - I used to work at Intel). I haven't looked into what design rule each of the processors is but I'd bet a large amount of money that the biggest "protection plan" they are offering is exactly on those larger geometries that need it the least because they are more insensitive to stress acceleration. Basically this is just a safe bet that plays on the physics and the market demand.
In a few years Intel will "mysterious(?!)" drop this protection plan for the simple reason they can not offer it without a financial loss. The less intelligent folks will get all huffy about "their right to protection" being taken away but what ever. You can only play to stupidity if there's money in it for you.
This also points out another absolute fact: over-clocking as a hobby is doomed in the near future because the margin for how much you need to achieve useful performance increases will run up against how much you need to age-out the processor to end-of-life failure in just a few years now. Probably by 15-20 nm.