Intel Offers Protection Plan For Overclockers 101
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."
Re:Why not for all CPUs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why Overclock? (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand what you are saying. My take on overclocking these days is: more is less. Yeah, you may get a tiny performance increase, but your energy efficiency goes straight to hell, and your cooling solution gets more complex, expensive, and (usually) louder. Then factor in the extra electricity bills to feed the computer, and the AC bills in the summer. It seems better to spend the money on a better chip from the start then to try to push something beyond its specs to get the illusion of something for nothing.
Re:Why not for all CPUs? (Score:5, Insightful)
The EE and K-series stuff is, shall we say, 'priced for the price insensitive'. Nothing wrong with that, voluntary on both sides, everybody knows that you can get 80-90% of the bang for less than half the buck by stepping back a few notches; but those parts are crazy overpriced. By contrast, their low end parts(especially in areas where they are going directly against AMD largely on basis of performance/$) aren't sold at a loss; but don't have nearly as much profit built in.
If they wanted to offer abuse insurance on value SKUs, and not lose money, the price would likely be a fair percentage of the OEM price of the CPU(very little margin on those parts, and only crazed overclockers would buy the insurance, so a high-risk pool and parts whose cost to intel is not so very different from their cost in store). Offering abuse insurance on the 'because we can' SKUs could be done at a much lower percentage of the OEM price of the CPU, because the cost to intel of that part is much lower than its price, and the entire market for those is crazed overclockers, so the additional riskiness implied by actually buying such insurance is not as great...