News Intel plans to deliberately limit Sandy Bridge overclocking

Great reason to stick with the existing sockets, what am I getting at the cost of throwing out OC ability again?

 

New socket LGA 1155 and LGA 2011..... Are you Kiddin me ?

 

I'm Afraid not

 

"deliberately limited with the intention to simplify board design and lower costs"

That's lowering costs..... not prices. How nice.

 

everyone go AMD

 

If they do indeed go ahead with these plans I would hate to see the knock-on effect this has to the other companies who provide parts for our systems.

 

The article says that Intel has consolidated every single system clock into a single base clock, which is completely different from an artificial (software) overclock block. Tweaking the base clock on Sandy Bridge will break USB, break SATA, and break PCI-e - it is said in the article that a 5MHz bump broke USB and SATA, and since the clock speed of the PCI-e bus is presumably based on the same base clock then those three factors will be the limits of overclocking on Sandy Bridge.

 

Sad thing is that we may just be forced too and it wouldn't surprise me if motherboard manufacturers do as well, how exactly can they sell high end motherboards for a platform that can't overclock? what can they use to differentiate between their motherboards than just I/O ports, the PCI placement and the headers/SATA ports on board? Gone will be the days of buying a motherboard to overclock. AMD should get a massive surge of extra fanboy's and extra income from people buying their CPU's which by the experience of this generation have lower performance but since Intel can't overclock you can just overclock to gain yourself performance better than the intel CPU's!

I realise the money to be made is on the cheapest of motherboards but if there was no money in enthusiast boards and OCing boards why would they do it other than for competition wins to add to their rep?

 

If this is the case I'll definitely be holding onto my current system for a good while longer, not only is the added performance a bonus, but just the act of tinkering itself is what draws me in and the feeling from trumping a £500 CPU with a £200 one for nothing more than the cost of a better cooler and a bit of know how.

Would definitely consider going AMD if their next iteration of CPU's do away with the K10 architecture and are going for a decent price.

Like a few people have also mentioned, this is going to have a definite knock on effect on a number of other manufacturers, namely Motherboard and RAM producers as well as Heatsinks and waterblocks, the demand for all of them is sure to drop a fair extent.

 

In principle this bothers me, but I don't really overclock these days so kind of a non issue for me.

 

For those of you saying to switch to AMD, bulldozer is still some way away.

For those of you who have already made the switch, how many of you are desperately hoping they make it AM3 compatible, as they did with the phenoms and 2+. Intels constant socket changing was the reason I switched to AMD.

As for the over-clocking thing, my guess is intel makes a lot more money. It seems like a lot of us out there dont overclock cheaper 'bang for buck' CPU's because we cant afford the more expensive ones, its because we like to give ourselves the victory of achieving the same performance for a lesser cost. Take the option out, and most of them will end up still wanting decent performance in games/rendering/encoding/benchmarking/ whatever you like to do with your CPU, and will buy the more expensive option.

That is price structure dependant, if bang for buck remains fairly constant. The high high-end stuff will probably still be ridiculously priced (see the i7-970). In the end, its that pricing structure, and the sockets (not only changing it every generation, but having different sockets within generations) which fuel most of my annoyance, not overclocking.

 

If this is true then Mintel are being too greedy, they have only recently released record profits.

Those that buy the xtreme cpus will continue to do so but Mintel will not force those that do not or can't afford them to purchase them, makes we wonder if this is a spin off from their recent "K" series of cpu's for overclocking...were they testing the market?

Are we going to have three catagories, buget not ocable, medium which will be ocable but multiplier still locked and xtreme with the unlocked multiplier.

One thing for sure if they are going to deliberately restrict their product so that they can charge a higher price for the unrestricted version then customers not like that, they will see that as profiteering and vote with their wallets.

 

I just thought of one thing... What if Sandybridge can overclock like hell? And Intel is afraid that the low Sandy's cannibalize the high-end sandy's?

It's possible, that the 32nm and the architecture are really good to OC...

Anyway, just want to wait and see, for now I'm considering AMD (if they deliver something close to their powerpoint slides)

 

Well, the performance crown has always swung between AMD and Intel, let's hope AMD can pull their finger out and come up with a viable alternative.

"My first processor in my first build was an intel core 2 duo E6700.

My next 7 processors were all intel and all overclocked."
!!!
My first CPU was a PIII, and I'm not sure I've had more than 7 since then (10-15 years ago)

 

Just realised this will pretty much put a halt to high end motherboards for the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA and MSI... no need for RoG or UD7 boards if you only need to flick a multi on the high end CPU's.

 

"My first CPU was a PIII, and I'm not sure I've had more than 7 since then (10-15 years ago)"

Mine was a 486 overdrive mis-sold as a P75 (by Tiny Computers) - it cost me £1,500 in 1995. Since then I've had 6 including my current rig. In fairness though, I started building machines for friends/customers to stop me wanting to upgrade my own so often

 

This is just funny in a way and expected

You all switch to amd that will be fun

An i920 at stock speeds beats amds top quad core overclocked on pure performance.

The i980 is brought by people who do alot more than game on there pc and a few of us have the chip and will not need to replace it for a good few years.

Intel has a huge percentage of the Market in the high end (i750 and above) there is not 1 competing amd product. Fusion is unlikely to deliver what is really required a cheap quad core that out performs the i930 by a considerable margin. It's never going to happen there 6core CPU gets owned by the i920 even sadly.

AMD are just not at the level they were once the days when the athalons was the gamers chip are long gone it's been nearly 4 years since I brought amd and it will be many more before I consider it

An unlocked multiplier means easy overclocks, for anybody

There enthusiast Market is below 1% of all CPUs sold so you all boycott they won't even notice the difference. If you think 10000 people switching to amd would affect there profits your very wrong.

Intels main buyers are still system builders like dell, most the people i know still shop at pc world or currys and don't even know what overclocking is. Once it's too slow they wi buy something better at pc world or dell. Alienware has a big Market for gamers who don't read this sort of site. 2 of my m8s read this site and still brought alienware

Scan overclockers Ect is love to know there total CPU sales as I'd guess it's not even 1000 a month which is a tiny number when compared with dells pc sales.

 

Am I reading the article and diagrams incorrectly, or does it look like and LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E and 'Patsburg' chipset WILL continue to have separate clocks and thus remain overclockable? Let me know if I'm wrong, but that's what it looks like.

If so . . . well, I guess enthusiasts will just flock to it and skip the LGA1155, no? Wouldn't be the first time that a lower-end socket got passed over as a dud . . .

-Tuthmose

 

You sir, are correct.

 

From what I've understood, most of the next gen intel chips will have artificially limited overclocking, LGA2011/1156 combined.
Only the K-series will be overclockable.

I had already decided to make my next Machine AMD based, just for cost, but if they are "upping the price for enthusiasts" then they're gone.