The Intel Overclock lock

Everybody loves intel. Since waging a price war with AMD, its CPUs have become much more competitively priced, and the continuing onslaught of its technical expertise has left the Athlon architecture looking decidedly dated. Its chips also tend to be more overclockable than AMD's chips. Unfortunately, it appears that the great fondness overclockers feel towards Intel could soon go the same way as Intel's multiplier unlocked processors.

Patent number 6,535,988 could turn out to be one of the most despised patents ever lodged. Lodged by an Intel employee, it describes a technique that has one purpose and one purpose only - to stop the overclocking of the CPU.

Thanks to a detection and prevention circuit, this technique allows the CPU to 'know' when it's being pushed faster than its rated speed. It then goes into super-sloth mode, cutting performance drastically (not a good thing!!!).

Intel claims it is introducing this technology to prevent unscrupulous PC retailers from selling lower-speed CPU's at higher-clicked speed. Yeah right . When's the last time you heard of this happening? Considering Intel locked the CPU multiplier serveral years ago, there have been very few cases of retailers being sprung for this devious scheme. So who's Intel targeting?

Well, how many people do you know that are currently running Intel's 3.06ghz pentium 4? You can probably count these people on the fingers of an armless man . But how many people do you know who run a slower speed Intel CPU, overclocked to above or equal to 3.06ghz?

So Intel could well be missing out on sales of its highest speed (and profit) CPUs to one of the sectors most likely to purchase them - gamers.

There's still no guarantee that this technique is going to be implemented - the patent was lodged back in 1999, so hopefully this is an indication that it's not going to be used any time soon .

this has been posted many decades ago but thanks for refreshing our memory over and over again

Many decades ago? It was only introduced like 4 years ago

I've only been in the forums for like a year, so I don't really know what happened before then. Found out about it so thought i should post it to inform everyone

i was kidding, but it has been posted many times already see the wink.
many decades ago we didnt even have windows. or even PCs

lets moan if/when they use it, really no point in whining about something they might maybe someday try if and so on, no worries

nothing is more annoying than the so-called "throttling." not to beat a dead horse, but if i'm getting a 1ghz o/c and i'm pushing the vcore up to something drastic and it starts throttling, which of course has happened to me a few times, i thank intel for possibly having saved me from snds and voluntarily "throttle back" myself after taking a big sigh of relief.

It ALL doesn't matter cause somebody...The Big Guys....Heavy Hitters....and so on will work around this and we will be happy again.