INTEL PULLS OVERCLOCKING PROTECTION

Is the age of overclocking over?

INTEL HAS DECIDED to ends its Performance Tuning Protection Plan. It will honor existing warranties, though, and the Xeon W-3175X will still be covered. Under the PTPP, you could pay an extra $20 or $30, depending on the model, to cover frying your chip while running it outside the published specifications. If things did go pop, you were eligible for a replacement.

Intel claims customers “increasingly overclock with confidence,” so there is little demand for PTPP. There is something in that—chips are (nearly) impossible to burn now. More pointedly, the overclocking scene has changed. When PTPP launched, it was the days of Sandy Bridge, and chips were sold with acres of unused headroom. You could take a Core i5-2500K and wring anything up to an extra 1GHz out of it. No modern chip has anything like that level of unrealized performance.

Intel now has strong competition from AMD, and the market for high-end chips is healthy. Virtually every chip has been carefully graded and optimized to reach its maximum potential. This, along with various new boost modes and thermal management systems, means there is often little to be gained by tinkering. Overclocking isn’t dead as such—adding some serious cooling remains a viable option—but the days of making a couple of quick tweaks and getting big returns are gone. Mid-range chips can be bumped by 5 to 10 percent for some tasks; the low end has more potential, but that’s only useful if budget is the primary concern. Overclocking won’t be popular until Intel and AMD sell chips that aren’t already running near potential, and in this competitive and speed-hungry market, they don’t.