ASRock hacked Intel's chipsets to allow OCing

[SPBHM]

most H and B series boards doesn't support SLI, am i wrong?

all the boards I've seen with 2 slots with B/H chipset always have the second slot connected to the PCH (for 16/4 operation), so no SLI support...

it's funny because the board clearly have access to the full 16 lanes from the CPU, the same way the z boards, but maybe intel implemented some lock (like the overclocking one), or it's something else

 

[PPB]

Hacking sounds too extreme, more like "woops, I just changed a value in the BIOS' microcode and now H87 can overclock!" kind of thing.

Probably with this measure potential buyers would be able to dump those saved bucks from going to a H87/81 instead of a Z87 into a better, aftermarket cooling solution, because..... you know

 

[CZroe]

Looks like the party is over:
http://www.techspot.com/news/53394-...l-block-overclocking-on-non-z87-chipsets.html

Week 30 (late July) Haswell CPUs include updated microcode to stop non-Z O/C.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Let's do some numbers:

Last quarter the PC industry moved 77M units and assume this doesn't drop this quarter. (unlikely)
Assume Intel has 80% marketshare. 61.6M (overestimate)
Assume Haswell only account for 50% for their shipments. 30.8M (Unlikely to be that high either)
Assume only like 5% of those uses the OCable chipset. 1.54M
If ALL of those switched to H series, Intel would lost like 1.54M x $20 extra (overestimate) for OCable chipset = $30.8M

$30.8M / ~$13B quarterly revenue = 0.24%. Yup, they would risk that little money for more potential losses in negative publicity and confusing consumers. Nope, gotta squeeze the market segmenting nut dry.