Is NVidia following in AMD's footsteps?

[PoX Freak]

Just a question, people......

Who here thinks NVidia is following AMD?
By following, I mean incorporating things into their chipsets that can and will make it harder to overclock their GPUs, now and in the future.
It seemed to start with the FX line of GeForce chipsets, and will possibly get worse as time passes.
Here's what i guess is going on:
AMD figured out ways to essentially "block" users from unlocking their CPUs by burying L1 and L3 traces beneath a slurry of poly, making it harder, exponentially, for users to unlock, or "hardware-overclock" their CPUs.
NVidia seems to be doing something similar, with the addition of a "control-block" added to the chipset, which renders the GPU unusable with anything other than the bios that was specifically written for it.
Even a slight change in the bios can render a card usless, until the original bios is restored.
Just my $.02

[IR1]

ATI had bios's that didnt allow for overclocks. The 9500pro and 9000pro. But a simple bios modification fixed that.

Nvidia seems to be taking even more extreme than AMD.

[TruckyJ]

The enthusiast community has always found ways around overclocking issues. I don't know if anything will and can be done with the new AMD chipsets to boost overclockability (I'm assuming this is what your talking [athlong 64/FX] about since the tb and barton chips came unlocked). They certainly can be overclocked, but not in the traditional sense of mulitiplier/fsb. My understanding is the frequency of the CPU can be adjusted and in turn clock the CPU higher. If anyone can shed some more light on this issue, that would be great since I don't know the absolute specifics.



On a side note, some of ATI's most recent GPU's have been amazing overclockers (the 9500pro especially) that have allowed users to get a very fast card for significantly less. The 9600 pro can generally overclock like a wild banshee as well. The XT versions of the 9600 and 9800 both have built in hardware/software overclocking. I have yet to hear how well this actually works, but it sounds like ATI has done a great job of giving gamers yet another reason to buy thier cards.

I honestly think Nvidia card buyers (those who just payed big money for FX chipsets) have bigger issues than worrying about overclockability [HL2!]. Furthermore, those buying 5900 non ultra's seem to have no problem hitting at least ultra speeds from what I've read. This sounds totally resonable to me.