Blogs What happens if Intel does end overclocking?

already there are Palm Pre's running at 1.2GHz from 600MHz.

@Fingers66, underclocking can be achieved by lowering multipliers. all normal (non black edition, non-K editions) processors have upper multiplier locked, but allow user to lower its multiplier freely.

 

Intel kill it, AMD don't....I'll buy AMD.

 

I heard the only the mainstream were going to be locked, the 'high end' 2011 kit still uses the old style tech so its busses wont be locked so standard OC'ing applies. This makes a lot of sense to me, think of how many businesses just need rock solid units. This would improve that factor by a fair margin.

Overclocking will never die, as people have said, there too much vested interest in it.

 

IF Intel ENDs OCing then AMD sales would go up lol but really, Intel never was really for OCing since day one thus why you would have to buy their EE editions of CPUs, they just have decided to tighten up their options to get the sales of EE to go up. Intel was never for the people, they just want money lol.

 

You hit the nail right on the head, once my computer starts to get slower I'd like to overclock it to make it last longer than if I couldn't overclock it

 

I'll certainly miss OCing. I bought an i7-920 becuase it was the dearest intel I could afford, but I knew I could overclock it, and do, to 4GHz. If the i7's were locked then I wouldn't have gone with intel as AMD offered faster for the money at stock speeds. Most of us can't afford a CPU fast enough to run games at their highest quality at stock speeds.

I suspect that intel will shoot themselves in the foot if they lock the new CPUs. It will push a lot of people to AMD at a time when intel has been doing so well.

Cant's afford that £450 i7 3.3 GHz Quad core? That's OK just get an AMD Phenom II X6 Black Edition 3.2GHz HexaCore for only £225.48!! Not fast enough? Hey, it can be overclocked!

Intel will only hurt themselves if they do this...

 

I'd just like to add that they need to realise that just because we'd buy a i7-920 for £120 and OC it to 4GHz doesn't mean that if we couldn't we'd run out and buy a stock 4GHz for £999!! We couldn't afford it!! Neither can most people, they'd look elsewhere... I suspect they would lose more money than they gained...

 

Well they aren't going to put themselves at a disadvantage against AMD. They aren't stupid... The chances are, their new chip will be faster than anything AMD have, so if you want the fastest chips, you will need to buy the intel chips, and you wont be able to overclock them.

I don't really have an opinion on it because there's no point. Intel are in charge. At the moment I think they are making good money from everyone flocking the the iWhatever chips, and then overclocking them as they see fit. If they think they can still make good sales but without people being able to overclock them, then that's just the way it has to be for us.

Personally I will miss it because I overclock my current chip. Unlike what the article says, the difference between 3.4 and 4.0 is quite significant, but more important is the difference between my current chip's stock 2.4 and 3.4. If it wasn't for this current overclock I would have had to upgrade a while ago. But for now I'm sitting pretty until later this year. When I do upgrade, it will be to an i7, and I will upgrade whatever that is to 4ghz. In games like Arma2 it will make a big difference, and without an nVidia card now, if I have to offload physics processing in games Mafia 2 to my CPU, then those extra ghz will help with that too. So it is quite a big deal to me at least.

But yeah, whatever, Intel will do what Intel needs to do. The AMD chips aren't great overclockers anyway, so there isn't really a competition.

 

Everyone migrates over to AMD chips?

 

i think what many of you fail to realize is even many non-hyper threaded quad cores are doing just fine with just about all modern games at full detail. it seems to me that currently 3.2ghz is sufficient, assuming you are running only the game and not many things in the background. i have a vfd screen that shows me live ram and cpu usage, as well as temperatures as i'm playing a game and my quad core never exceeds 80% and i never exceed 2gb of ram (i'm running windows 7 32 bit). i'm an amd fan and i can admit, intel does have faster products overall, but unless you multitask like crazy and care about having the very fastest there is, why do you care about having something that has literally at least twice the performance that you'll ever use? i'm guessing for all of you who do stuff like video encoding a lot didn't buy the movie you're ripping, so i think if you're going to be cheap on that you can be cheap on a cpu as well an wait the extra few seconds to minutes. if you're encoding a video you actually made, i'm sure you didn't buy adobe premier or whatever you used to edit it either.

as much as i don't agree with it, i completely understand why intel is preventing overclocking. as you get more cores, every mhz begins to be more noticeable. with 12 logical threads, a 100mhz overclock becomes a theoretical 1200mhz if you add up the processing power of each core (logical threads aren't as powerful as a dedicated core so it would seem like less than 1200 but you get the idea). overclocking by an entire ghz gives you an insane performance increase if you have a hexa core i7, or even a quad core i7. until intel can come up with a cpu with each core noticeably faster than its predecessor, nobody would bother buying from them again, and the way marketing works is when a new release comes out, the older stuff gets cheaper so intel therefore would make less money because the money they could have made on i7 is significantly decreased. but we don't have the technology to make something much better than i7 yet, so intel made a new instruction set which does noticeably improve performance, and i guess if they want people to use it, they're going to be forced to buy the new cpu and prevent overclocking. for those of you who don't know, sandy bridge is going to have a shared system clock so everything becomes overclocked when you overclock the cpu, which then crashes everything. this is supposed to give positive benefits but honestly i don't think the benefits would be noticeable and its just an excuse intel made up so you can't overclock.

btw, for those of you who think intel is entirely dominating the high-end cpu market, no, they aren't. amd's 12 core opteron performs much better than the 12 logical core threaded intel xeon competitor at a lower price, lower frequency, and surprisingly lower wattage. the only time the intel cpu is faster is when theres a process that can't handle that many threads. this is because intel's cores are at a significantly higher frequency and obviously incidentally they individually have more processing power.

 

Yes, of course.. NOW.
But what you are forgetting is long term. At the long term your CPU will last 3 years. So to cover at least a 5 year life cycle you'll need to cash out A LOT of money for the highest or near highest end CPU model. Would you pay 1000$ your CPU? I would not.

 

roumors like these drive sales of chips in the last days of the socket....

still think my i5 750 i the bargain chip of the moment.

 

I'm sure I remember reading a similar article referring to the Socket 1366 before it had been launched. It ended up being implemented as a thermal capacity restriction within the chip(set) to restrict to safe overclocking, and which has simply been by-passed by bios revisions if my understanding is correct?

Implementign a wholesale lockdown will simply move people over to the rival, surely?

Mainstream overclocking is about getting more bang for buck. It's about getting the most for a price point that you can afford. If intel were to somehow be able to lock the performance of all their non extreme, non "K" processors, then every AMD processor would be able to out perform them by virtue that you could overclock them. Locking down intel's processors would driver hobbyists builders/tinkerers away from them, especially now that AMD is just getting competitive again.

I would guess that most other water cooling enthusiasts like myself would sooner switch to a rival socket, and be able to nip and tweak ratehr than be forced into buying a £1000 CPU just for the priviledge of overclocking.

Intel to make this work would need look at the cpu's that are being overclocked the most at each price point, and offer the consumer an overclocking model at each price point. Otherwise dwindling sales of their cpu = dwindling sales of their licensed chipsets = increases in sales of rival chipsets. This could seriously let Via, NVidia or even an ARM based processor into the desktop market ultimately if a whole consumer NEED is ignored, ie the hobbyist.

There's a lot of money involved in this kind of decision, and I don't think a business like Intel will seriously be entertaining "cutting off their nose to spite their face" like this....

 

I agree with this.

It is quite cool to see a cheap mid range chip benchmark the same as £700 chip though.

 

The way I see it, the overclockability of a CPU is already factored into the price when I look at buying it: I'm not getting "something for nothing", I'm getting "something I've paid for".

The idea that we should pay more for special-k parts equates to a price hike for enthusiasts only. Given we represent such a small portion of the market, surely Intel does not stand to gain significantly from this move? If they're worried about system builders, why not set some lawyers on the problem, they've got enough of those. Surely it wouldn't be hard to make it illegal to resell an Intel CPU at anything but stock speeds/to advertise that it is stable at those speeds/to offer a warranty for those speeds without paying an "overclocked CPU tax" for the product in the first place? This way they control the resellers who are making a fair bit of cash out of pre-overclocked systems, but they don't #### off their enthusiast followers.

I'm sorry Intel, but removing a feature should mean lower prices. Stop messing your customers about and maybe I'll trust you long enough to buy a CPU from you.

And, Intel, do bear in mind that for every CPU I buy, I give at least 8 other people advice on which they should buy. I imagine this is the case for many of the people on this forum. Make a heretic out of one of us and you lose more than just one customer, I guarantee you that. Abusing your market position = not a good idea.

 

Still buying amd would be a poor substitute

As the intel 920 is still out performing the best amd CPU

 

I actually prefer to buy a decent overclocking board, then never overclock it. Why? Headroom...if it's stable when overclocked, it'll be stable when not overclocked for YEARS.
All my previous systems still run, the oldest one is over 10 years now

 

Not onbly that but the better overclocking motherboards run cooler when the CPU isnt overclocked because the components are better and the cooling on the motherboard is better than the cheap boards. I will never buy the bog standard motherboards with very little cooling on it.

 

It's a "price hike" for getting a faster CPU.

You want a 2.5GHz CPU, it costs $x.

You want a 3GHz CPU, it costs $y.

You want a 2.5GHz CPU that easily overclocks with a multiplier change to 3GHz, it's going to cost almost as much as $y, because that's the CPU it is as fast as.

Can you buy an 64 gig SSD, then go update the firmware to make it a 128gb SSD? Can you buy the 4-cylinder model of the car, flash the ECU, and make it the V6?

I don't like this any more than you do. Overclocking is a huge cornerstone in the foundation of the PC enthusiast community, a community I've been a part of for nearly a decade. It is directly a result of Intel having a near-monopoly on high-end enthusiast computers. There's a lot of pressure on AMD to come out with Bulldozer or Fusion and restore competition to the market. We'll see how long the "no overclocking" lasts if there is a $200 Bulldozer chip that hits four gigahertz. But you can't argue that Intel is in anyway obligated to provide is with $300 CPUs that can easily overclock to just as fast speeds as their $600 CPUs.

 

The Core i5 750 produced a massive 40% gain in average frame rates from a similar overclock, which is incredible.

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page14.html