What happens if Intel does end overclocking?
Posted on 29th Jul 2010 at 12:42 by Richard Swinburne with 79 comments
I've taken to the armchair looking out over the veranda, scratching my wispy beard while sipping an ice tea. I've pondered long and hard about the consequences of the overclocking restrictions Intel apparently plans for its upcoming mainstream Sandy Bridge CPUs.
The feedback in our news post mirrored my own initial reaction: how dare Intel! How dare they stop us from generating £700 CPU performance from a £150 one?
Commercially speaking, there's a good argument it never made any sense to allow overclocking in the first place - I can't imagine Intel sales were happy to see etailers selling pre-overclocked bundles and whole PCs, or enthusiasts flocking to mid-range chips such as the i5-750 rather than high-end models. Flock they did - one of our most popular articles is how to overclock a Core i7-920 - despite the fact it's nearly two years old now.
While Intel's sales teams probably aren't happy about overclockers pouncing on cheap chips, they're probably not losing too much sleep over it. The enthusiast market is tiny compared to its mainstream sales and pre-OC hardware is limited to smaller companies only. If we compare the number of Scan (just one example) pre-OC kits and PCs to the amount say, Acer or Dell ship only ever at their rated speeds, it's a tiny percentage - why should Intel care? This is especially the case given the fact Intel is in its most profitable state ever and has yet to really see revenue from the explosive smartphone/tablet market - that'll further develop in 2011/2012.
In its long history, Intel has only recently acknowledged enthusiasts anyway, and as with all the other markets it competes in, it's really only interested if it can make serious money - hence its idea of making up for lack of sales volume with high prices. Spend a thousand dollars and get a CPU with a fully unlocked multiplier. Woo bargain, cheers guys. I even wrote an article about this back in 2008.
This alone makes the existing K-series CPUs something of a big deal for Intel, and I wonder then if for Intel, they're the first step to a bigger plan for defining a logical separation between the different, non-interoperable sockets it's offering to consumers.
LGA1366 proves that many enthusiasts have accepted paying more for a performance platform: £200+ motherboards and a £200 CPU, plus expensive 6GB triple channel kits still sell. I know at least one manufacturer whose biggest market is X58 boards in the UK. If LGA1366 offers more overclocking options then that's another reason for enthusiasts to buy it over LGA1155. That said, by providing the K-series CPUs, if you do want to fully overclock with Sandy Bridge, you can.
In both scenarios, you will pay more - but let's be honest here, we all love upgrading, and if the upgrade is worth it we will budget around it. AMD's protracted weakness when it comes to performance means Intel has an advantage and if Fusion isn't any good then Intel will continue to be the only option.
If Special K is your only option, will you upgrade?
That said, as I drink my ice tea, I wonder if the lack of overclocking really is a big deal. When was the last time you thought your current PC was CPU limited? Can you really tell the difference between a 3.3GHz CPU and 4GHz? Will you really miss those extra multipliers for a few extra MHz? I'm not talking about a benchmark machine where a few MHz matter for a better 'number' - I mean the one you use every day. You say you will now - you think you need it - but if it came down to working within a budget, a large proportion of the users would live without it.
I'll admit I was seething at Intel for taking away from a hobby that all enthusiasts of all ages can enjoy, not just those who have lots of cash. Nostalgia is a powerful thing until I realised my own CPU isn't even overclocked. 95 per cent of the time it sits at 1,176Mhz and I rely on TurboBoost for the rest. I get more pissed off that it would crash than if it takes a minute longer to encode something. 30 minutes longer? OK that's a big difference, but it's an extremely rare event and unusual I can't multitask around it.
If that angle is taken away then we're left with less than scintillating features such as energy use, component quality and price. Do people really care about energy use? Maybe, but not in the way they do for performance. Even if they did, motherboards aren't something that factors that heavily in terms of power usage, certainly not compared to PSUs, graphics cards and CPUs.
Component quality - well, if you believe the marketing, we're already at 50,000+ hours of super-ultra-military grade OMFG capacitors that will save us from cancer, so what else do we need, and do we care as long as it works? If it breaks I want a good after sales service and warranty.
And then there's price. Well simply put, a price war is a death sentence for motherboard manufactures. For the top three companies motherboard divisions are their most profitable areas, so a price war is an absolute last resort. Remember they want to upsell you.
If I was a senior person in a motherboard division I'd be sweating through a shirt an hour right now.
Do you put more eggs into the Fusion basket? How long until it reaches the market though?
Do you push overclocking with K series CPUs and hope there isn't a huge consumer backlash? What about good publicity and reviews? Will anyone even need them if the boards all overclock the same and it's simply a case of "does it work"? Yikes! I hope not - I need to get paid!
The bottom line is that if Sandy Bridge does dramatically curtail overclocking then the enthusiast end of the PC industry will change drastically. In some respects, it already has - we already live with multiple sockets, this is just the next step. Perhaps our best hope is for a competitive future between AMD and Intel because one company dominating and dictating the market is bad news for everyone.
The feedback in our news post mirrored my own initial reaction: how dare Intel! How dare they stop us from generating £700 CPU performance from a £150 one?
Commercially speaking, there's a good argument it never made any sense to allow overclocking in the first place - I can't imagine Intel sales were happy to see etailers selling pre-overclocked bundles and whole PCs, or enthusiasts flocking to mid-range chips such as the i5-750 rather than high-end models. Flock they did - one of our most popular articles is how to overclock a Core i7-920 - despite the fact it's nearly two years old now.
While Intel's sales teams probably aren't happy about overclockers pouncing on cheap chips, they're probably not losing too much sleep over it. The enthusiast market is tiny compared to its mainstream sales and pre-OC hardware is limited to smaller companies only. If we compare the number of Scan (just one example) pre-OC kits and PCs to the amount say, Acer or Dell ship only ever at their rated speeds, it's a tiny percentage - why should Intel care? This is especially the case given the fact Intel is in its most profitable state ever and has yet to really see revenue from the explosive smartphone/tablet market - that'll further develop in 2011/2012.
In its long history, Intel has only recently acknowledged enthusiasts anyway, and as with all the other markets it competes in, it's really only interested if it can make serious money - hence its idea of making up for lack of sales volume with high prices. Spend a thousand dollars and get a CPU with a fully unlocked multiplier. Woo bargain, cheers guys. I even wrote an article about this back in 2008.
This alone makes the existing K-series CPUs something of a big deal for Intel, and I wonder then if for Intel, they're the first step to a bigger plan for defining a logical separation between the different, non-interoperable sockets it's offering to consumers.
LGA1366 proves that many enthusiasts have accepted paying more for a performance platform: £200+ motherboards and a £200 CPU, plus expensive 6GB triple channel kits still sell. I know at least one manufacturer whose biggest market is X58 boards in the UK. If LGA1366 offers more overclocking options then that's another reason for enthusiasts to buy it over LGA1155. That said, by providing the K-series CPUs, if you do want to fully overclock with Sandy Bridge, you can.
In both scenarios, you will pay more - but let's be honest here, we all love upgrading, and if the upgrade is worth it we will budget around it. AMD's protracted weakness when it comes to performance means Intel has an advantage and if Fusion isn't any good then Intel will continue to be the only option.
If Special K is your only option, will you upgrade?
That said, as I drink my ice tea, I wonder if the lack of overclocking really is a big deal. When was the last time you thought your current PC was CPU limited? Can you really tell the difference between a 3.3GHz CPU and 4GHz? Will you really miss those extra multipliers for a few extra MHz? I'm not talking about a benchmark machine where a few MHz matter for a better 'number' - I mean the one you use every day. You say you will now - you think you need it - but if it came down to working within a budget, a large proportion of the users would live without it.
I'll admit I was seething at Intel for taking away from a hobby that all enthusiasts of all ages can enjoy, not just those who have lots of cash. Nostalgia is a powerful thing until I realised my own CPU isn't even overclocked. 95 per cent of the time it sits at 1,176Mhz and I rely on TurboBoost for the rest. I get more pissed off that it would crash than if it takes a minute longer to encode something. 30 minutes longer? OK that's a big difference, but it's an extremely rare event and unusual I can't multitask around it.
Who really loses?
The biggest losers aren't actually consumers, but Intel's partners: motherboard guys mostly, but also heatsink and the watercooling companies. Multiplier overclocking puts very little stress on the motherboard beyond power provision and if every CPU can achieve the top multiplier then what cards do motherboard companies left to play? The major marketing arm for almost everyone right now is overclocking - overclocking events, overclocking quality and stability, HWBot etc. It's seen as the F1 of the industry: developments here fritter down to use mere mortals through BIOS updates and the next board revision.If that angle is taken away then we're left with less than scintillating features such as energy use, component quality and price. Do people really care about energy use? Maybe, but not in the way they do for performance. Even if they did, motherboards aren't something that factors that heavily in terms of power usage, certainly not compared to PSUs, graphics cards and CPUs.
Component quality - well, if you believe the marketing, we're already at 50,000+ hours of super-ultra-military grade OMFG capacitors that will save us from cancer, so what else do we need, and do we care as long as it works? If it breaks I want a good after sales service and warranty.
And then there's price. Well simply put, a price war is a death sentence for motherboard manufactures. For the top three companies motherboard divisions are their most profitable areas, so a price war is an absolute last resort. Remember they want to upsell you.
If I was a senior person in a motherboard division I'd be sweating through a shirt an hour right now.
Do you put more eggs into the Fusion basket? How long until it reaches the market though?
Do you push overclocking with K series CPUs and hope there isn't a huge consumer backlash? What about good publicity and reviews? Will anyone even need them if the boards all overclock the same and it's simply a case of "does it work"? Yikes! I hope not - I need to get paid!
The bottom line is that if Sandy Bridge does dramatically curtail overclocking then the enthusiast end of the PC industry will change drastically. In some respects, it already has - we already live with multiple sockets, this is just the next step. Perhaps our best hope is for a competitive future between AMD and Intel because one company dominating and dictating the market is bad news for everyone.
79 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyIf your into Emulation like i am, then you will know just how important EVERY 100mhz increase in clock speed counts....
In MAME, where everything you see on screen is rendered with only the CPU, the difference between 3.3Ghz and 4Ghz can make the difference between a constant 60fps and a choppy, inconsistent 50-55fps........
Maybe this is all rumour and speculation but it would be nice for Intel to come out and put it all out on the line now.
On top of which, there are some rather clued up, intelligent, people out there on the O/C scene (As you well know). If it's at all possible, I'd be surprised if they didn't find a way around Intels limits.
sure, overclocking is fun to play with at first, but once you get pass that initial "wow it's fast in benchmarks" moment, overclocking is rarely compulsory.
Gone were the days when you needed full ATX kit, because you wanted that offboard sound, and networking, and to a bigger degree, graphics.
It seems that those generation of modders/tweakers are now grown up and cant be bothered with modding, overclocking, watercooling etc. And just want a stable system, that does what they want. (I myself only play the occasional game now, on a weekly basis, compared to my 3-4hr of counterstrike an evening (with Tim/Bigz, and the gang back then).
I've been running shuttles for years now, which fully comply with what i want, without being a hulking big ugly box.
Im sure there are a younger mob who will come and take up my aging torch, but, it seems they are mainly all throwing their money at consoles. Because PCs nowadays seem to be more about facebook/twitter, with the young generation, and not PC gaming.
It WOULD be sad for the chipmakers to block off this avenue of tweaking, but as sure as eggs is eggs, either tweakers will find a way, or the motherboard manufacturers will (look at AMD core unlocker for instance, im sure AMD love that).
Now, Bindi, pour me some of that ice tea, and we can rememeber the good old days :)
I've posted in the other thread how I feel that allowing the overclock is hurting their higher end sales. No one in their right mind would buy anything more expensive than the i7-920/930 now, because they overclock to 4GHz and compete with the more expensive quad cores.
As enthusiasts, we can only hope that a new AMD architecture comes along. Fanboyism or not, IMO one of the biggest reasons Intel is able to do this is because of how significantly the i7 outperforms anything in the AMD line-up.
Having an inexpensive super-overclocker CPU cannibalizes the sales of your own higher end CPUs. However, it also hurts the sales of your competitor's midrange and high-end CPUs.
Let's say for a moment that AMD and Intel each have a $200 CPU and a $500 CPU. If intel's $200 CPU overclocks to be as fast as both $500 CPUs, it will take away sales from both of them. However, it will also take away sales from AMD's $200 CPU, because it offers more bang for the buck. It makes sense for intel to sell this chip, because what they lose in profit from the $500 chips, they more than make back in profit on the $200 chip, because overall having this great bang-for-the-buck CPU is gaining market share for the company.
It looked like overclocking was dead when AMD did away with the multiplier unlocker trick on the Athlon XP. But overclocking has remained, because you can use a super-overclocker chip to take away competitor marketshare. They've even made money by offering unlocked multiplier chips at a price premium.
However, AMD is hurting right now. We know that. Their flagship, the Phenom II X6, is much closer to Intel's midrange Core i5 lineup than to the flagship i7 lineup. There aren't any high end CPUs from AMD that would lose market share to a less expensive Intel super-overclocker. The i7-920 that goes from 2.66GHz to 4GHz on air, that isn't taking away P2X6 sales, because it's 50% more expensive and significantly faster than a similarly clocked P2X6. What it is doing is taking away sales from the i7-950, i7-955, whatever the faster quad core i7s are. Nobody who wants flagship i7 performance is buying a P2X6. They're buying the cheapest i7s and overclocking them.
Once AMD has a $400 flagship that can compete with the upper end of Intel's line-up, an inexpensive i7 that can beat it would help Intel's sales. But AMD just isn't there. When I bought my P2X6, I wasn't even looking at i7, because of the price premium. I was looking at the i5-750. Intel has a monopoly on the high end market, and the first consequence of this will be securing the position of its high end chips by not letting its midrange chips cannibalize the sales. This is Intel resting on its laurels, looking at ways to increase its profit, not ways to increase its market share.
What we all need is for the AMD Fusion to come out of the gate and stir up some competition. Overclocking is a great way to take market share away.
And with the overclock, assuming no gaming, the computer is still crazy fast for everything else that a average user will user, and it runs Windows 7 64-bit above and beyond.
Overclock is very important as it add so much value to a computer.
If we remove overclock, then there is no need to custom build computer either. Dell and HP makes more affordable computers (on special) than if you custom build.
I saw one a Dell XPS system (some time ago) with 9GB of RAM, Blu-ray player, GTX 260, Core i7 920 for under 999$.
If I want to replicate this, custom build, I'll be well over 1500$. But I want the superior component quality, which frankly exists due to overclocking feature that motherboards manufacture provides.
I know exactly what will happen.
People will ask computer enthusiasts "I need a new computer, what do I get?", and they will answer "Get an AMD, Intel sucks". It seam crazy, BUT it worked for Vista. Most people you ask on the street: "Why Vista sucks?", they all answer "Oh because XYZ told me so.", and if you ask who is XYZ it's going to be "My son, he is a genius in computers", or "[some tech from work place] he knows his stuff".
Computer enthusiasts are a very small group indeed, but I believe we have a strong impact on the market.
At the moment, the i7 875K retails for ~£45 more than the 870. If Intel stick to this price model, it's not too bad. If, on the other hand, the price is greater than double that of the locked CPU then I'll be pissed off for one.
This would be true only if the components used in the Dell/HP were as energy efficient and long lasting as those you can assemble in a custom build, which they will never be.
Just yesterday i installed a friend's new system. We had an 875k running at 4,5GHz, stable for 20 passes of Linpack, within 2 hours of the first boot. It's rediculous.
It sucks, but a smart motherboard company adapts instead of complains. Bending is always better then breaking.
There is so much that motherboards can still do to differentiate themselves. Features, aestetics, form factors, ease of use, EFI BIOS, onboard GPUs, SSDs and RAID controllers, integrated routers, why not? While i like overclocking as a hobby, i think motherboard companies are diving too deep into it and are forgetting their aim on other fronts, that could mean a lot more for the actual day-to-day use of their customers.
Overclocking is great to extend the value of a cpu, but with an unlocked multiplier you can still do that. Making us pay for a chip that can do that is far from unreasonable.
As it is, i believe we as PC enthousiasts will have about 10-15 years left before there is nothing left to talk about. Already there are phones capable of playing enhanched versions of DOOM. How long untill we have pocketwatches that laugh at Crysis?
Stop complaining people, and keep innovating! We are modders, we take what the companies sell us and make it even better. No matter how many restrictions or changes they throw at us, that will never change!
Yea but Dell and HP cut corners using cheap PSU's and motherboards which will be illrelivant with sandy bridge in terms of overclocking but I've had 2 dell mobo's die in OC's nor more than 2 years old at most. The other place they skimp on is their cases while quite solidly built are a nightmare to upgrade due to lack of airflow.
I'm sure they will make more money by doing this rather than trying to sell high priced extreme edition cpu's.
How exactly mobo companies can differentiate their products....who knows....usb3, NF200, hydra chips, ram overclocking
Whilst Intel would like to upsell us every year, some of us cannot afford it and want to use overclocking as an option for extending the use of a CPU.
Question: if they stop overclocking, will they also stop underclocking? I assume that if they are going to lock the multiplier and FSB speed, how are we going to underclock an old CPU for use in a NAS etc?
Generally the multiplier can still be lowered on "locked" multipliers
My CPU has a 14x multiplier. I could go in the BIOS and set it to a 12x or 13x multiplier, but not a 15x multiplier. "Cool n Quiet" will lower it down to 4x when idling, and "Turbo boost" will raise it to 16.5? when I am only using two cores.
That's the thing - Intel doesn't WANT you to extend the life of your CPU. They don't want all of us that have C2Ds still being able to play the newest games on them. They want us buying Core i7s. Overclocking is something for nothing, and it hurts their sales. It has an overall benefit to competition and improving PCs, but Intel is a publically traded company whose goal is to make the most profit.
Many friends of mine, and people I know preffer the cpu that's 20 dolars more expensive even when in most cases they dont overclock.
Aaand also, it will be awesome for the McPeople, it will just work. That's all it will do nevertheless
I am not too fond of overclocking my CPU because of the heat issues with my CPU and motherboard. I have a Corsair H50 with two fans cooling the CPU. Even if the CPU was at stock speeds I would use a half decent cooler to prolong the CPU's life. I know overclocking my Q660 is reducing its lifespan but I do plan on changing my CPU , Motherboard and RAM next year to a decent Core I7 CPU if one is available at a resonable price and is 3.2GHZ or over.
The thing I enjoy most about overclocking is the 'thrill of the chase', so to speak. Regardless of whether my PC is powerful enough for what I need it to do, I love tinkering with settings, messing with the BIOS, and generally seeing how far I can push things. It's a hobby that is more than just chasing benchmark scores.
If Intel do 'kill' overclocking I may lose a hobby, as I can see that the price premium for overclock-able hardware is going to be large.
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.
Overclocking will never die, as people have said, there too much vested interest in it.
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 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 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?
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.
still think my i5 750 i the bargain chip of the moment.
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 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.
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 :D
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.
http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page14.html
Remember People use processors for more than gaming and those that overclock usually want the most they can get for as little as possible. Take those people who encode video or run VM's. Every little helps majorly in both situations. Even a heavily CPU bound games responds well to slight overclocks, take GTA4 for example which is an exception rather than the rule of what you mentioned above. Not a lot of things you can throw more cores at to speed up, unless you look at dual socket boards in which case your getting into very expensive components, overclocking is the only option to keep the budget down.
Not even close to true. A quad core running at 1GHz does not equal a 4GHz single core by any stretch of the imagination. You can't add frequencies to get relative performance increases. a 100MHz overclock is still a 100MHz overclock regardless of cores available.
Look at market share to see whos dominating not how well you think their CPU's perform. Yes Ferrari have some of the fastest cars in the world but Ford still dominates more of the market than them. I also refer you to bit-tech's review on both
Bit-Tech review
LOL I wholly agree with my friend :-) Very good point indeed! ^^d
For me overclocking is like tuning a sports car. Sure a sports car is already fast but can you add a turbo charger and fine tune the engine and make it faster? Hell yeah.
Well overclocking my CPU and GPU is like fine tuning for me and for Intel to even think about restricting this makes me say screw You then I''ll stay with AMD.
I can surely tell a huge difference between my Phenom X2 550 @ 3.0ghz versus 3.9 ghz on Air I may add. it goes from OK to SNAPPY DAM FAST. Not Intel i7 Snappy fast but I saved a few bucks too.
The shear joy I get knowing that I'm getting MAX performance from my chip is confidence in AMD and their manufacturing quality and happiness in my hobby.
Intel is just taking all the fun away for shareholder profits and not realizing that overclocking is also individualism and freedom of expression. you can take two of the same chips and they will perform identically until you overclock them and now mine is different from your.
I'll stick with the company that respects the experience of the consumer versus the corporate bottom line.
P.S. hurry and drop the prices of the Core i7 950
Does the car come with a free turbo charger in the trunk for you to install? No. You pay extra to buy the turbocharger. The same way they are still offering Special-K.
Maybe (assuming AMD's Bulldozer is any good) they will be forced to consider users again in future designs, but only if they have genuine competition.
If Intel do decide to lock down these chips, then as mentioned vendors suffer, but not that much as it will bring to market, AMD, one not to follow in Intels footsteps, may take the reigns and lead the overclocking horse once again. It may even bring in a new CPU supplier based on non conformity of a locked CPUs. Lets' just hope that Intel do see the light.
Regarding my first statement, I'm aware many people don't do gaming, but it seems to be the main focus on people with high-end home CPUs. Otherwise, like I mentioned earlier, its typically for something like video encoding or (like you said) virtualizing; in which case, it is likely they didn't pay for the product they're trying to use. I personally don't game that often so a dual and quad core has been sufficient for me, and I do do virtualization. Also I didn't say I disagreed with overclocking, I'm saying i completely support it but i can see why intel doesn't.
As to what GoodBytes said, if you really want something with good future performance, it'd be smarter to pay for that extra performance when its obsolete and incredibly cheap. Pay for a low-price CPU that can easily cover you for the next 3 years or so (including overclocking) and then replace it with something that today is overkill, like the higher-end i7s.
regarding my 2nd statement, i didn't say it adds up to a total of 4ghz, i'm saying the performance combined PER THREAD is relatively similar. if you have 1 core at 4ghz operating on 1 thread, a quad core of the same architecture operating at 1ghz on the same single thread would theoretically complete the task at around the same time. of course there are factors that can make the single core perform noticeably faster or slower, but my point is that for a single process, the 2 CPUs would not have a significant gain over each other. in multiple processes the quad core will always be faster.
As to my 3rd statement, the early opteron 6000 series i found completely sucked. it was so much worse than it should have been. keep in mind intel has always dominated the market even at times when their cpus were noticeably more expensive and/or slower than at least one of the competitors. when sun's ultrasparc T2 was released, that was so much faster than anything anyone made (i'm not sure about ibm though) but it didn't get anywhere because it was solaris and linux only. its like microsoft - windows sucks, even windows 7 has a lot of work to be put into it, but MS has been so successful because they know how to do business right.
Just keep in mind, intel has been sued billions of dollars multiple times for being anticompetitive or simply paying people to lie. today, amd and intel made an agreement to put this anticompetitiveness (if thats a word) to an end, but the damage has already been done and intel really does have the fastest. they wouldn't have gotten to this point if they didn't rake in all the money from their successful anticompetition campaign.
Who doesn't browse the internet while, downloading MP3's and Pron while watching pron and chatting via Video Skype on a second screen while a torrent is running and streaming live TV all at the same time with a third screen dedicated to either youtube or facebook and burning copies of cartoons for siblings
Overclocking used to be a fairly huge thing for me - back in the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP / 64 days, it made massive, massive differences. Yet, curiously, since the advent of the dual core, the need to finish every single task as absolutely fast as possible seems less impressive as you can complete multiple tasks at once, seemingly without a hit.
You have to look into what the "turbo charger" is and what the "tuning" is. In the OC world the "turbo charger" is the Cooling (A nice water cooling setup or just some sweet air cooling) And the "tuning" is the OC'ing. But the car manufacturer doesn't say that you cant tune the engine, but they say you do it at your own risk and expense. But, and this is a very big but. ITS FREEEEEE!!!! You don't buy a model that is "tuning" friendly for 5000$ more.. do you? Got it?
its just like the socket the AMD socket on the main board you can not break. the breakable things are the pins on the CPU it self In other Words AMD does not settle up main board makers with there weakness/warranty
As were it comes to Intel CPU the very very weak spot is the socket on the main-board and not the CPU making sure the cost of warranty are dropped at the main board makers that's just not nice
the price difference between a budget i7 920 and a "Normal" CPU i7 960 is insane double the price but not double performance that's why nobody buys one and just overclocks his budget CPU
Wen it comes to power consumption and performance i go for performance any day
I would miss it; overclocking is half fun of getting a new chip.
Even a successful overclock will limit the life span of your motherboard (not the processor).
No system with major overclock will last more than a year (give or take a few months)
Usually along with the motherboard you will damage the memory too.
Please do not believe those reviews about overclockers motherboards. Yes it is very easy to overclock a system. Yes the speed advantage is tangible. BUT . after a year or so of continuous use (24/7), your system will start misbehaving.
Your bios will come up with the message overclock failure, then you start getting instability problems, then you get the big problems (blue screens etc), then you buy a new motherboard.
Processors today are powerful enough, after years of experimenting with my PC I can say this .. All I want is . A FUNCTIONING PC
:D
I've had plenty of big overclocks running far longer as I'm sure many others have; hell my E8600 is running at 4.3Ghz right now and has been going for the last 2 years.
It breaks on you, because you don't know what your doing, nor know what you are changing.
I know one common mistake is that people increase the voltage of EVERYTHING, without doing anything else... That is asking for disaster, and provides no speed increase.
Voltage should NEVER EVER be touched only if you know at 1 xillion percent what you know what you are doing, and when you do you increase is by a few mili-volts... And even then.
Do you really think that a lower end CPU is actually made slower? You do realize that the reality of thing is that it's not the highest, but near the highest model which got downclock and sold for cheaper. So overclocking it PROPERLY, would simply mean to put the CPU at it's normal designed speed. As for the highest end one, it's simply an overclock one from the manufacture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge_%28microarchitecture%29
And it looks like the 2010 release will be a low end CPU, and the high-end ones will be end 2011. Also, it seams that SandyBridge end 2010 release chip will be dual channel memory as well (not that it really maters, but it's a sign it's aimed at med or low-end systems).
Additional info, suggest that the Intel GPU will be included in the processor and will support 4 displays, 2 via standard video ports (DVI, HDMI, Display Port), and 2 other via USB.
Hmmm...... My current system is a Core2 E6600 overclocked to 3GHz with an MSI P965 Platinum
Runs like that 24/7. has done for over 3 years. No issues WHAT-SO-EVER.
I've been overclocking since the days of the original pentium, before the days of overclocking in the BIOS. My first overclock was bumping a P133 up to 200MHz (WOW!)......
Guess what, I had that system for 5 years before it finally gave up the ghost. even then, it was because I had a new PC and was just using that one to mess around and see how far I could push it.
I think you are mistaken......
As I said, (if you bothered to read what wrote before you replied), the processors don't have any problem with overclocking, motherboards do. Never ever have I lost a processor for any reason. I have lost plenty of motherboards though.
Maybe I am unlucky with mobos but.. the fact is that I lost another ASUS mobo 6 months ago. The death was slow, and painful (for me at least). It is not that they die completely. Mine started with the raid array failing randomly.... slowly but steadily things deteriorated further.... at the end, when i changed the mobo and i took the heatsinks off the northbridge and the southbridge and the thernal paste/pad undeneath them had become a cement like substance.
I have lost many systems due to overclocking the processor to the absolute chip limit. The processor never ever gets damaged it is usually the motherboard that gets damaged one way or another.
By the way and before another guy starts going on about voltages, I must state that I never increase voltages....
Processors do not suffer motherboards do. I build raid 5 or raid 10 systems. These are much more sensitive
Lol.......;)
You will do it, when your computer gets too slow, at which point you don't care. Because, if you OC you can extend a year the system, which is fine, or if all fail (for some odd reason), you buying a new computer in any case.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
yes as a matter of fact I have.
Do you?
I love the opportunity to build new systems. :D
Yes..... I pay 300 Euros for a motherboard, but no....... I am not going to use the onboard controller, I will pay another 1000 Euros to buy a 'proper' raid 10 controller...... Or maybe I should buy a 'proper' server farm for my computing needs?.... Wouldn't that be great?
Well instead of your 'useful' comment I prefer to leave the processor at stock speed and run the onboard raid-10 to keep my data safe.
On your second comment....... Ask yourself.....
If I raised the voltage as you suggest.... my motherboards would be alive, instead of dead? No
If my computer runs overclocked for a year doesn't it mean that OC was succesful? Yes
Please think before you write
about the article.. this might be a good chance for amd to pimp chips
There will always a way to go beyond the stock speed if you have a good oc mobo.
It will just make the chips out now all the more valuable to have... i.e. cpu are limited in run will cost more rather than less when the chips are down {pardon the pun}
Then again I mainly use it for gaming, which is far more gpu-limited. At least if you crank up the settings.
Average pc's are limited more by networking and storage performance for average tasks (like gaming).
LOL, this is because your CPU is is fairly new.
Wait until it reaches 4-5 years old. Every 100MHz gain will decide if you'll have a choppy gaming experience or a smooth one.
I really like being able to buy a cpu at £200 & have it run as good as a £700 cpu :D;).
In the end I just hope intel doesn't put an end to overclocking, it would be a big loss & a leap backwards for the consumer pc world & would cause me to say bye bye to intel & hello to AMD I'm pretty tempted by the x6 AMD black edition at the nice price it's at but still want to see whats next for AMD cpu's before I upgrade.
My current intel q9650 oc'd to 3.8ghz is pretty sweet as it's running at a smidge over default volts so it's still using a low power draw, if I bump it up by just 200mhz to 4ghz it requires much more volts & makes it draw near double the power so I found it's sweet stable low power spot after some blue screens :), I would definately miss a great bonus like this if intel got rid of overclocking potential.
I'll be cheering Fusion and Bulldozer wipe the floor with Sandy Bridge.
And tbh I don't see much of performance gains coming from SB anyway.
Mark my word - If AMD didn't make Athlon, we'd still be on a "mature" Net Burst arch.