Intel Launches "Overclocking Insurance" Program

[Andy Chalk]

Intel Launches "Overclocking Insurance" Program

Intel has launched a pilot program offering one-time replacement insurance for CPUs damaged by overclocking.

Part of the "fun" of being a hardcore PC gamer is making your stuff run faster than it's supposed to. It's called "overclocking," and it essentially involves turning the clock speed of your CPU up and over its specified limits in order to gain a performance boost. Some users are satisfied with a little tweak and a couple hundred extra hertz, while others install complex liquid cooling systems, crank the voltage and don't quit until they hit the 5Ghz wall or burn their house down. For those folks especially, Intel is now trying out a new "insurance policy" that will provide an extra layer of protection for those awkward moments when something blows up.

For anywhere from $20 for a Core i5-2500K to $35 for a Core i7-3960X, Intel's "Performance Tuning Plan [http://click.intel.com/tuningplan/]" will provide tweakers with a one-time replacement for CPUs damaged by overclocking. Standard warranties don't cover overclocking damage, so this is a relatively inexpensive path to peace of mind for those who enjoy dicking around with things they don't entirely understand.

There are limits: the program doesn't cover "Damage to the Eligible Processor due to external causes, including accident, problems with electrical power, abnormal electrical, mechanical or environmental conditions, usage not in accordance with product instructions, misuse, neglect, alteration, repair, improper installation, or improper testing." And while overclocking could technically be said to qualify as most of those exceptions, the fact that it's intended specifically to cover overclocking damage should render them essentially meaningless.

The insurance doesn't cover all of the many other things that can go wrong during an overclock [Smell that? That's what needing a new motherboard smells like.] and CPUs are far more survivable now than they were a decade or so ago, when a few seconds of bad judgment usually meant an expensive trip to the computer store. On the other hand, 20 bucks for a three-year license to do stupid things to your PC strikes me as a pretty fair price. Much like overclocking itself, your mileage may vary, but I think I'd go for it.

Source: Kotaku [http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/19/intel-introduces-overclocking-insurance/]


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[Lost In The Void]

An interesting idea for sure. I personally dont dick around with my CPU but this does seem like a good idea for those who do.

 

[RA92]

Raising your clock speed is mostly pointless these days, since games are more GPU-intensive than CPU now. Hilariously, one of the few reasons you may want higher clock speeds, other than using graphics application, is if you're trying to play console games on emulators rather than PC games.

 

[ph0b0s123]

Raising your clock speed is mostly pointless these days, since games are more GPU-intensive than CPU now. Hilariously, one of the few reasons you may want higher clock speeds, other than using graphics application, is if you're trying to play console games on emulators rather than PC games.

My bother who uses his PC mainly for rendering 3D and media would disagree with your not needing to overclock. Basically anything this is not games is going to benefit from more Mhz. Also that are a few games that are CPU bottlenecked as well, just can't remember them off the top of my head.

 

[MercurySteam]

Raising your clock speed is mostly pointless these days, since games are more GPU-intensive than CPU now.

Every single member of Overclock.net [http://www.overclock.net/] would disagree with you. Overclocking in just about every program, increases performance and decreases time taken to perform certain processes. The very reason Intel is still making more and more powerful CPUs is because they haven't even come close to hitting a wall yet, and every benchmark for every game I've ever seen has a an improved framerate with overclocking. It's no secret that GPUs get outdated faster than CPUs, but overclocking is a good way to get a little bit extra for whatever you spent on your CPU (in addition to of course, an aftermarket cooler).

On the other hand, 20 bucks for a three-year license to do stupid things to your PC strikes me as a pretty fair price. Much like overclocking itself, your mileage may vary, but I think I'd go for it.

Stupid? Really? As long as you know what you're doing, there's nothing 'stupid' about overclocking. Intel's Sandybridge processors (which this 'Performance Turning Plan' is designed for) have proved to be great little overclockers and are even heralded as the best thing to come out of Intel's labs since the Core 2 Duos. With proper advice and a little know-how, you can get a decent performance boost, which is anything but stupid. And when you're paying so much to build you're own PC, let's face it, it's the least you deserve.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Not to insult anyone, but if you manage to fuck up overclocking so bad you damage your CPU, you probably shouldnt be doing it.

this folks, is why i don't dick with how my PC works, it runs fine as is and it might not like it if i start poking its brain to make it go faster

 

[MrTub]

Raising your clock speed is mostly pointless these days, since games are more GPU-intensive than CPU now. Hilariously, one of the few reasons you may want higher clock speeds, other than using graphics application, is if you're trying to play console games on emulators rather than PC games.

Just want to point out that pretty much any 4X game will leave your cpu bottlenecking like hell.

For an example; try to play Star ruler with over 500 planets and no ship limit.

Cause after about 10-15hrs the enemy will have around 1k defensive platforms around their planets, so lets say they control half the planets which would mean that they have 250k defensive platforms(which are stationary ships) (excluding their fleets)

 

[Waaghpowa]

20 bucks for a three-year license to do stupid things to your PC strikes me as a pretty fair price. Much like overclocking itself, your mileage may vary, but I think I'd go for it.

Fuck yeah, totally with you on that.

I'll look out for this when I buy a new CPU, some of the i7 sandy bridges have gotten cheap since I bought my i7 930.

 

[MrTub]

20 bucks for a three-year license to do stupid things to your PC strikes me as a pretty fair price. Much like overclocking itself, your mileage may vary, but I think I'd go for it.

Fuck yeah, totally with you on that.

I'll look out for this when I buy a new CPU, some of the i7 sandy bridges have gotten cheap since I bought my i7 930.

Just want to point out that i7 930(1366) uses a different socket then i7 2600(1155) and I would wait until Ivy bridge is released (will also be socket 1155)

 

[Waaghpowa]

20 bucks for a three-year license to do stupid things to your PC strikes me as a pretty fair price. Much like overclocking itself, your mileage may vary, but I think I'd go for it.

Fuck yeah, totally with you on that.

I'll look out for this when I buy a new CPU, some of the i7 sandy bridges have gotten cheap since I bought my i7 930.

Just want to point out that i7 930(1366) uses a different socket then i7 2600(1155) and I would wait until Ivy bridge is released (will also be socket 1155)

I'm thinking mostly long term since I'm aware of socket differences, I have no intention of replacing a whole motherboard any time soon.

 

[The Lugz]

Raising your clock speed is mostly pointless these days, since games are more GPU-intensive than CPU now. Hilariously, one of the few reasons you may want higher clock speeds, other than using graphics application, is if you're trying to play console games on emulators rather than PC games.

I realise you've probably gotten more reply's to this than your comfortable deleting from your inbox, but frame-rates and microseconds really matter to some people they like to minimize any minuscule delay from their life that they can, so much so they'll spend £2000+ on ssd's, gaming network cards, custom routers and networking software, network stack hacks and having the latest £200 ram kit because,
'omg it's a billionth of a second faster'
I've seen gamers do that, they do it often and yes it is somewhat ridiculous but anyone that dedicated to their art is a bit ridiculous

and that's before you include the crunching / folding and over clocking clubs themselves, who love to get the very best from their machine and routinely order new component upgrades for their motherboards and graphics cards between hardware releases and mod ( or in some cases, completely re-engineer them! ) themselves
i saw a guy on extreme systems that specialises in volt-modding psu's for example so it has the exact perfect voltage under load ( they vary somewhat at stock, he wanted a more stable psu so he built it himself )
extreme enthusiasts will gobble this guarantee up every time, i assure you
it's worth it for the just-in-case factor, in fact there is a term called the 'suicide run', where you know a chip is near it's limits and you deliberately push it over the edge to try and squeeze that one last miracle run of super pi out of it before it literally melts
just to attempt to set a record!
now imagine if you could send that chip back and get a new one to sell on ebay before moving on!
that's definitely worth while to some people

and yes, wall of text but i figured a one liner basically consisting of 'no way' was a tad crass

 

[Bostur]

Makes me wonder why they don't just sell the cpu's at the maximum speed they can handle. Not as much fun I suppose ;-)

If there is a market for overclocking insurance, there ought to be a market for CPUs clocked 'to the limit'. Of course with a disclaimer that it may be unsuitable for mission critical applications. After all intel is probably better at it than us botchers, that kind of know what we are doing.

 

[achilleas.k]

For those saying that OCing is useless, have you seen the difference it can make on the newest Sandy Bridge CPUs?

An OCed i5 is as fast as a stock i7 and probably £100 GBP cheaper. All it requires is a couple of hours of experimenting and a good £20 cooler (which you should have anyway). So it's not just enthusiasts dicking around for epeen, it's a viable option for squeezing the most value out of your budget. On the latest chips especially it's not that damaging. I'm running a the i5 2500k (stock speed 3.3 GHz) at 4.4 GHz and it rarely goes up to 60 C.

It's basically free a performance upgrade, assuming you have the time to find the appropriate configuration that works for you.

Also, while it's not easy to fry a CPU when experimenting with OCing, very high OCing (some have clocked the 2500k to 4.9 GHz!!!) can cause problems in the long run. So the insurance is a good way to have some peace of mind when you're running at the absolute maximum clock speed you can get.

The insurance is a lot less than the price of the performance-equivalent stock-clocked CPU.

Makes me wonder why they don't just sell the cpu's at the maximum speed they can handle. Not as much fun I suppose ;-)

If there is a market for overclocking insurance, there ought to be a market for CPUs clocked 'to the limit'. Of course with a disclaimer that it may be unsuitable for mission critical applications. After all intel is probably better at it than us botchers, that kind of know what we are doing.

Intel sells CPUs with a cheap cooler and guarantees that it will work under almost any circumstance (say, a hot summer where ambient temps are > 40 C). No one can guarantee that even the slightest OCed CPU with the stock cooler during heat waves will function properly. It also varies based on your other components. So the "stock" clock speed is, in some sense, the maximum speed they can handle under almost any condition.

 

[Bostur]

Makes me wonder why they don't just sell the cpu's at the maximum speed they can handle. Not as much fun I suppose ;-)

If there is a market for overclocking insurance, there ought to be a market for CPUs clocked 'to the limit'. Of course with a disclaimer that it may be unsuitable for mission critical applications. After all intel is probably better at it than us botchers, that kind of know what we are doing.

Intel sells CPUs with a cheap cooler and guarantees that it will work under almost any circumstance (say, a hot summer where ambient temps are > 40 C). No one can guarantee that even the slightest OCed CPU with the stock cooler during heat waves will function properly. It also varies based on your other components. So the "stock" clock speed is, in some sense, the maximum speed they can handle under almost any condition.

And that makes sense of course. But when they sell an insurance they are basically making a guarantee for overclocked CPUs. Having several product lines with different expectancy of durability would seem more logical to me. But there are probably practical legal problems with that approach.

 

[Andrew_C]

So it excludes "abnormal electrical, mechanical or environmental conditions"

That totally excludes at least 3 methods of overclocking I can think of, and I'm not even an overclocker. Seem bogus, like most insurance.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Not to insult anyone, but if you manage to fuck up overclocking so bad you damage your CPU, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

Exactly. In 99% of cases, when overclock goes bad it results in failure to boot until you reverse your settings to default. So the risk is really minimal if you have even a vague idea of what you're doing. First thing I did when I bought my [now 4 year old] PC, I overclocked the CPU from 2.4Ghz to 3.6Ghz.

But it's cheap, and I guess that makes it a good idea for some people. I can't say that I'm against something like this. It's an option, and some people will be happy to have it.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

That's actually a fairly good deal. I, myself have never needed to overclock, but if I had that insurance I'd probably make a go at it.

 

[The Lugz]

So it excludes "abnormal electrical, mechanical or environmental conditions"

That totally excludes at least 3 methods of overclocking I can think of, and I'm not even an overclocker. Seem bogus, like most insurance.

in plain English what they mean is:

'volt-modded motherboards, obscene bracket pressure and thermal materials ( particularly diamond paste and direct fluid / cpu contact ) ie the sort of maniac that would remove the pre-installed metal heat spreader cap on the cpu for an extra 1 degree c, or liquid nitrogen'

i'm pretty sure i know exactly what they're thinking having spent some time around extreme over-clockers and trust me they do punish hardware.. intel needs a recourse in-case people try to blatantly abuse the system

ok, i mean 'when' people try to abuse the system

 

[Strazdas]

So i guess im the only one in this thread thinking only mad people do over-clocking anyway?