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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.
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.
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.
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.
Not one word of your post is true...Sorry.
Because other CPUs are not unlocked and therefore not very good for overclocking.
"Simply tear down the package and replace the micro fuses and install in a new package."
Would you like to know how I know you don't have experience in this field?
Chip lithography is very much a one-time thing. Once it's made, you aren't adding on anything else. Spare silicon is gone. If it breaks, you're screwed, get a new one or nothing at all, those are your only answers.
The only recycling likely to happen will be melting the package down to get the metals out, and Intel would leave that to a reclamation company. There would NEVER be a refurbishing plant made, I can almost guarantee you this, as it's cheaper and easier (plus more logistically sound) to make a new one.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, technically you can repair some types of damage to the metal or add new connections (with FIBs for example), but it's expensive, and might induce some latent failure modes. Plus with CPUs you need to repackage it (glob top wouldn't make a good thermal connection), which can be extremely difficult. Useful for failure analysis, but no one would even think of repairing a customer return.
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...