Intel Offers Protection Plan For Overclockers

MojoKid writes "Intel today unveiled a pilot program that provides warranty protection to overclockers in the event they get a little bit overzealous with pushing the pedal to the metal. For a fee, Intel will provide a one-time replacement of certain processors that are damaged by overclocking and/or over-volting. It's completely optional and in addition to the original three-year standard warranty that already applies to Intel's retail boxed processors. Intel isn't yet ready to flat-out endorse overclocking but the Santa Clara chip maker is perfectly content to provide a 'limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking,' for a modest fee, of course. The deal applies only to certain Extreme Edition and K-series (unlocked) processors currently, in Intel's Core i7 and Core i5 families."

times change

[Formalin]

Never thought I'd see intel go for something like this, although I don't bother with overclocking these days.

from TFA, since the summary neglected it:

Processors in which you can purchase a Protection Plan include:

        Intel Core i7 3960X: $35
        Intel Core i7 3930K: $35
        Intel Core i7 2700K: $25
        Intel Core i7 2600K: $25
        Intel Core i5 2500K: $20

Seems fairly affordable if you plan on burning one up, I suppose.

Why Overclock?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the performance of today's processors, I really don't see any reason to overclock beyond "my clocks are bigger then yours".
Overclocking is a great way to ruin perfectly good hardware that costs a pretty penny to begin with.
Undervolting, underclocking, that I can get behind. Less power consumed, less heat produced, lower energy bills.

When my cheap AMD Quad Core can handle HD Multimedia encoding in a decent length of time, why push it beyond it's capacity for a few seconds, minutes off of that time? For a production studeo, sure, but for a home user? get real.

Re:times change

[jimmydevice]

Having tested 8 core processors with and without cooling while testing at Intel, I would say it's a sucker bet.

Brilliant business move

[bikin]

This is a brilliant business move from Intel in every sense. This is what should go to the Harvard Business Review instead of Use Case Studies that can mostly be attributed to luck.

• It encourages people who know what they are doing to overclock already powerful CPUs, which means they can demonstrate machines that will hardly be surpassed by the competition.
• It is pretty low cost, because the user pays the protection AND their variable costs on new CPUs are low (most of their costs are fixed, in development, factory building, manufacturing line assembly, etc.).
• Generates good will.
• An overclocked processor will either fail soon or not fail at all... which means replacements will happen while the processor is still being manufactured.
• By the time the processor fails, is sent, comes back, etc. a lot of time is lost, and the processor value is likely to have gone down, which will likely discourage fraud by sellers trying to pass overclocked processors to unsuspecting clients.