How much does overclocking affect CPU manufacturers

[TheDug]

Okay I admit I have been out of the loop for a while now. Just read up about the new CPUs Intel has (Sandybridge, etc) . So we basically can't overclock the low end CPU's anymore . That sucks! Anyways my point is I don't think the vast majority of people overclock their CPU's and even those who do, only a very small fraction of CPU's do actually need replacement (yeah I've never actually seen a CPU die on me yet - but then again I don't really push the limits). Also I don't know how many people avoid high end CPUs and just overclock a low end CPU and make do. Does anybody have any facts and figures as to how much no overclocking is helping Intel (AMD?)?

 

[Soulkeeper]

I think highly overclockable cpu's increase sells.
I've never seen any evidence/figures to the contrary.
Case in point Athlon XP days resulted in me buying over a dozen AMD cpus just so I could overclock them. If they weren't overclockable I would not have bought any of them.

It's a different mindset
overclockers don't think about or even care what frequency the CPU is they are buying.
They only care about how far it can overclock, what fsb/bclk they can set, what multiplier options they have, etc.
Offer a peice of silicon that can overclock to an ultimately faster speed and they upgrade.

I think AMD/Intel management are failing, where they've succeeded at times in the past, to understand/embrace this. Especially AMD, as I sit on a $1000 llano system that can't even hit 3GHz ...
Waiting for a partially unlocked "upgrade" due in another month, which will still be slower than a 4yr old core2 quad ...

 

[Idontcare]

Welcome to the forums TheDug! :thumbsup:

 

[skipsneeky2]

The locking business is sorta lame i will admit.

Not everyone can fetch the coin for a p67 set up with a overclockable quad core.

I built a h67 based i3 2100 system with a radeon 6790 but now i wanna drop in like a i5 2400 but i fear it would bottleneck a 7970 which i wanna buy in about a months time.

Without proof the i5 2400 can bottleneck a 7970 it is a gamble and since the h67 won't oc a i5 2400 well now i need a p67 or z68 and more then likely a 2500k to ensure no bottlenecks...but maybe it sounds crazy .

 

[peonyu]

When in doubt pony up the $ for a K. Bclk is so risky to try ocing with, some folks cant even go above 102 bclk [2% overclock].

 

[4ghz]

Obviously, Intel's intent was to force tinkerers to pay $200 and up if they wanted to play. Intel is probably sifting through the sandybridge sales numbers to see if they were able to force an upsale on people. If it worked expect it to continue. If not maybe they'll pull back.

Unfortunately, my guess is that it did work. Personally, I would have bought an i3 for $100 to $120 and clocked it to 4.6ghz to 4.8ghz if they weren't locked. Instead I have an i5 2500k which I still got cheap used but I would have been more then happy with the i3 for less.

 

[Diogenes2]

Their intent is to get the highest possible price for their products, and remain competitive for their stock holders.
Any business has a right to offer different levels of products, and let the free market decide if a given product is worth the price being asked ..

Individual overclockers are probably a drop in the ocean, compared to the overwhelming majority of their business ..

I would guess over 99% of CPUs sold by Intel and AMD go to OEMs..
Locking, is mainly aimed at preventing fraud by system integrators.
i.e., buying cheap chips and selling them as more expensive versions..

 

[Arkaign]

Overclocking affects the makers very little in the big picture because 99% of home and business consumers have no idea what it is in the first place, not to mention that virtually all 'branded' PCs by Dell/HP/etc have no bios overclocking options.

Intel saw a way to gain a little more $$ from the market by locking all of their processors except 'enthusiast/gamer' chips, which would only be utilized by a select few anyway, and away we went.

 

[GrumpyMan]

I like the new bios on the new mobos that are out. Provides a safe overclock when needed and dials it down when not. Why not charge a few more bucks for the simplicity of it? Business will always be their #1 though, no ocing.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

You know just about 5 years ago I bought a brand new Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6400 $230 just after they had been repleased. This new processor had been really outstanding and was outperforming anything else we had released before.

Today for $10 less then I paid for that processor you can pick up the Intel Core i5-2500K which give you really world class performance out of a $220 processor.

 

[skipsneeky2]

You know just about 5 years ago I bought a brand new Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6400 $230 just after they had been repleased. This new processor had been really outstanding and was outperforming anything else we had released before.

Today for $10 less then I paid for that processor you can pick up the Intel Core i5-2500K which give you really world class performance out of a $220 processor.

Yup and i bet a $37 Intel g440 outperforms Intels fastest pentium 4 extreme processor which retailed for $999...

The i3 2100 which i own right now according to many benchmarks outperforms the q6600 which i did once pay $300 for and the i3 2100 at $125 is a amazing piece of silicon.

 

[Diogenes2]

You know just about 5 years ago I bought a brand new Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6400 $230 just after they had been repleased. This new processor had been really outstanding and was outperforming anything else we had released before.

Today for $10 less then I paid for that processor you can pick up the Intel Core i5-2500K which give you really world class performance out of a $220 processor.

But how does that address the OP?

How much does overclocking affect CPU manufacturers?

I'm guessing, not very much ...

 

[peonyu]

Obviously, Intel's intent was to force tinkerers to pay $200 and up if they wanted to play. Intel is probably sifting through the sandybridge sales numbers to see if they were able to force an upsale on people. If it worked expect it to continue. If not maybe they'll pull back.

Unfortunately, my guess is that it did work. Personally, I would have bought an i3 for $100 to $120 and clocked it to 4.6ghz to 4.8ghz if they weren't locked. Instead I have an i5 2500k which I still got cheap used but I would have been more then happy with the i3 for less.

It worked. The K series is for enthusiasts and most anyone who overclocks has a K. I dont like the price premium much, but atleast we can raise the multi above its factory default.

 

[Concillian]

Enough that they're squeezing the "value" overclockers quite a bit more than they used to.

That's really all that matters.

What used to be about a customer extracting extra value out of a given chip has now become about a chip extracting extra value out of a given customer.

Can't blame them, but it sucks, yes.

Looking on the bright side... If this was done in the music industry or the movie industry they would have accused us of stealing and sent lawyers to our house... So, it could be worse.

 

[pm]

Way back in 1995/1996 when I worked on the original Pentium, there were really no limits on overclocking at all. Multipliers were so unlocked that it would just do whatever you told it to - there were no fuses, so we relied on the BIOS to set the value correctly. So if you bought a Pentium 90, then the chip just relied on the system builder to set the ratio correctly.

At that time, we at Intel had a pretty substantial problem with "remarking" in which various organized criminals would change the markings on the chip to make a 90MHz CPU look like a 120MHz CPU. Then when the customers returned their CPU's back to Intel because they were defective, we would find out that someone had actually just changed the laser etching. They'd sand down the cover - or just pop it off and replace it - and then re-etch it. This was actually a really seriously expensive problem - a criminal could buy a 90MHz CPU and then change some writing on it and resell it for much more money and when it had problems, Intel was left to foot the bill.

So I remember when we "locked" the first multipliers back then. I was in the meeting with the engineers and the marketing team and I sat in the corner and didn't say much, but I can say that I was there and there was absolutely no talk about the enthusiasts overclocking... at that time in ~1996, the first clock multiplier locks were all about limiting losses due to organized crime.

Clearly over time since 1996 things have changed, and my experience 15 years is likely barely relevant to the modern industry except as a (hopefully) interesting anecdote. I actually have no clue about the industry impact nowadays. But I do know that ~15 years ago, there was no discussion at all about overclocking impacting revenues and the first multiplier locks - which I helped work on personally - were definitely not implemented with overclocking enthusiasts in mind.

*Not a spokesperson for Intel Corp. *

 

[Belegost]

I had one of the p54c 90s. That was fun when I figured out how to oc it. There was a bios setting for multiplier, 1, 1.5, and 2. And a motherboard jumper for chipset clock, either 60 or 66. So the stock configuration was 1.5x60, first I ran 1.5x66 and got 100... But then I realized I could change the mult too, so I tried 2x66 for 133. Hung booting into Windows 3.11 (you know, for workgroups!) But the OEM heatsink was fanless, just a little piece of aluminum with some spikes. Which was pretty crazy, none of the machines I had before got so hot they needed this huge (at the time, think about the size of a chipset heatsink today) chunk of metal cooling it.

I grabbed an 80mm fan and angled it to point at the heatsink, and it worked. I didn't like the noisy fan so I ended up going to 120, but for a while, I had a machine going as fast as the chip Intel released a month later. And that was damned cool.

As one engineer to another, thanks for giving me that, because of things like that I work on the next generation of cool hardware. Admittedly mine is mobile these days, but I hope some kid messing with his android phone gets inspired by my work someday.

 

[lOl_lol_lOl]

Enough that they're squeezing the "value" overclockers quite a bit more than they used to.

That's really all that matters.

What used to be about a customer extracting extra value out of a given chip has now become about a chip extracting extra value out of a given customer.

Can't blame them, but it sucks, yes.

Looking on the bright side... If this was done in the music industry or the movie industry they would have accused us of stealing and sent lawyers to our house... So, it could be worse.

This. The difference in performance between CPUs of two successive generations has become so negligble that upgrading a CPU has become a matter of updating the platform. Intel realized this and divided the SB arch into several chipsets.

enthusaist - P67, Z68, X79
Dual/quad channel, PCI-E, quicksync, vT-d, K etc are spread across several cpus of one gen, SB. And this happened in one Gpu cycle...

Upgradeability to IB only ensured more of us would buy SB, even then alot of us wouldn't have the latest standards platform-wise.

 

[Idontcare]

Enough that they're squeezing the "value" overclockers quite a bit more than they used to.

That's really all that matters.

What used to be about a customer extracting extra value out of a given chip has now become about a chip extracting extra value out of a given customer.

Can't blame them, but it sucks, yes.

Looking on the bright side... If this was done in the music industry or the movie industry they would have accused us of stealing and sent lawyers to our house... So, it could be worse.

I bought a 2600K which at the time was about the most expensive top-performing CPU I could throw my money at in terms of single-threaded performance (and multi-threaded provided we aren't talking those handful of emberrasingly parallel situations where SB-E and Gulftown thump it still)...and despite Intel extracting as much "value" from me as a consumer as they did, I still gave ASUS even more money than Intel (my MIVE-Z cost more than my 2600K), and the same was true for OCZ (my 240GB V3 is the most expensive component in my rig).

The price compression in SKU's that are not the absolute top-tier xtreme SB-E stuff is just amazing. The mind boggles at times that here you have a $200-$300 peice of silicon that makes everything go and yet the mobo itself, or the storage device, can fetch an even higher ASP.

Seems a little out of whack if you ask me. The 2600K could have been a $500 cpu and I am pretty sure I would have still bought it and felt it was priced right. That it was only $300 was nice though, I hardly feel taken advantage of by Intel in the grander scheme of things.

 

[Arachnotronic]

The price compression in SKU's that are not the absolute top-tier xtreme SB-E stuff is just amazing. The mind boggles at times that here you have a $200-$300 peice of silicon that makes everything go and yet the mobo itself, or the storage device, can fetch an even higher ASP.

Seems a little out of whack if you ask me. The 2600K could have been a $500 cpu and I am pretty sure I would have still bought it and felt it was priced right. That it was only $300 was nice though, I hardly feel taken advantage of by Intel in the grander scheme of things.

Yeah. 100% agreed. Some people are just absolutely hideously cheap...it's actually kind of sickening.

I'm a poor college student, but I manage to get out there and do what's necessary to save for the gear I want. People with real jobs should have *no* problem dropping $200-300 on a CPU every year.

 

[Puppies04]

I bought a 2600K which at the time was about the most expensive top-performing CPU I could throw my money at in terms of single-threaded performance (and multi-threaded provided we aren't talking those handful of emberrasingly parallel situations where SB-E and Gulftown thump it still)...and despite Intel extracting as much "value" from me as a consumer as they did, I still gave ASUS even more money than Intel (my MIVE-Z cost more than my 2600K), and the same was true for OCZ (my 240GB V3 is the most expensive component in my rig).

The price compression in SKU's that are not the absolute top-tier xtreme SB-E stuff is just amazing. The mind boggles at times that here you have a $200-$300 peice of silicon that makes everything go and yet the mobo itself, or the storage device, can fetch an even higher ASP.

Seems a little out of whack if you ask me. The 2600K could have been a $500 cpu and I am pretty sure I would have still bought it and felt it was priced right. That it was only $300 was nice though, I hardly feel taken advantage of by Intel in the grander scheme of things.

Completely agree, every time i see someone complaining that the I3s are locked I just can't believe they won't stump up for the I5 2500k. It is an absolute steal, and by the time you have arranged all the shiny gubbins that us overclockers "need" (decent OCing mobo, SSD, overpriced RAM, overrated PSU, aftermarket cooler) they look almost criminally underpriced.

I have made this point before and I stick by it, I would have happily paid 50% more for my 2500k and at no point would I have felt "ripped off"

In a way we need to thank intel, maybe they nudged people into upgrading to a quad when they felt they only needed a dual core but all those extra quads are out there now and it can only hasten the long needed push for game and software manufacturures to start assuming their target audience is running a quad and start coding for it.

 

[iCyborg]

I'm a poor college student, but I manage to get out there and do what's necessary to save for the gear I want. People with real jobs should have *no* problem dropping $200-300 on a CPU every year.

You're a poor college student with i7 980X and 580 GTX? What do normal students in your school have? Maybe I should quit my job and go back to school

 

[GrumpyMan]

Everyone's definition of "poor" is different apparently.....lol.

 

[Vic Vega]

When I was a "poor student" I had a cobbled together Celeron 300A system. The CPU was the only part I paid for, everything else were parts people were throwing out, literally! That's my definition of poor.

 

[lOl_lol_lOl]

When I was a "poor student" I had a cobbled together Celeron 300A system. The CPU was the only part I paid for, everything else were parts people were throwing out, literally! That's my definition of poor.

Pentium II and 56K till 2004. Beat that.

 

[lOl_lol_lOl]

You're a poor college student with i7 980X and 580 GTX? What do normal students in your school have? Maybe I should quit my job and go back to school

Its his dream rig for Gods sake. Let the guy live a little.

Look you even made him change the 580 to 5450 in his sig.