News Intel locks overclocking to K-series Haswell chips

Is anyone surprised by this?

 

That's weird. If VT-d is absent from the i7-4770K then it's no good to me. Are you absolutely sure about this? Can there possibly be an engineering reason or is Intel just playing silly beggars?

 

I was sure that in previous gens it was the bclk that people tweaked, more specifically in haswell the strap. Certainly jj from asus has stated that if you really want you can adjust the strap on the non k parts.

 

Yep, I've Googled and it's true. No VT-d support means no i7-4770K for me. I guess the i7-4770 will do fine and as no overclocking means I don't need a top of the range motherboard, RAM or cooling I can up the budget for other stuff. Crazy decision on Intel's part. Maybe a GTX Titan just came into range!!!

 

Bob, what do you need VT-d support for?

 

High speed access to hardware for virtual machines. Not a particular issue for me right now but within the lifetime of the next build I expect it to be. Even so it's a close call and I fully accept that for many lack of VT-d support in the "K" series CPUs won't be a problem. I'm just thankful I found out in time.

 

So they're not even allowing the 4 bins they gave on the Sandy and Ivy non K CPUs?

That's pretty terrible. Maybe the bclk can be used?

 

I wonder if Intel's reasoning is because VT-d becomes unstable when OCing. Otherwise, disabling such a feature on a more expensive CPU really doesn't make sense. I'm sure Intel also doesn't like the idea of people buying overclockable desktop parts for server use, since you'd end up saving a lot of money on something that will last much longer.

 

The Skt 2011 processors -K and not [or are they all 'K' models?] have VT-d support, it's only the 1156/1150 ones that don't... so want Virtualisation and overclocking? SB-E/IB-E is what you want/need...

EDIT: Apparently the SB-E K series only support VT-d on the C2 stepping...

There is also the AMD option... iirc all their processors have AMD-v or whatever their vitualisation gubbinz is called...

 

I think the lack of VT-d issue has been persistent on all K models since Sandy launched.

 

Thanks for the quick response, Gareth. In asking the question I didn't mean to question your journalistic credentials: I was in shock!

 

It has shirty as they want you to buy a more expensive CPU or a none overclockable one.