Intel CPU's have OC black box

[Ron 61]

Screw the warranty, just lap the cpu and be done with it.

[freakBYnature]

Agreed, and IMO the RMA SHOULD be denied. The warranty on a retail CPU is only with the stock cooler at stock clocks, anything else you take the risk into your own hands.

I thought about just that yesterday, why the hell is there only warranty on it IF YOU USE THE STOCK COOLER.... atleast the A64 and x2 cooler really blow! So that part makes absolelutely no sense at all to me.

[oublie]

What about the motherboards that automatically set a higher fsb e.g. my old abit used to register 271 fsb at stock setting instead of 266 and the cpu freq was obviously slightly higher than stock by default this could be seen with cpuz and the bios. This would mean that the mb manufacturer overclocked my cpu not me so who's to blame now and if i was refused an rma because of this can i claim of my mb manufacturer? Granted not much of an overclock but whats an overclock and what isnt?

[freakBYnature]

Screw the warranty, just lap the cpu and be done with it.

Like I said just.... the warrranty is already void when using anything but the stock cooler... so I say so aswell.. F*UCK IT!

[[XC] gomeler]

This makes perfect sense, these companies shouldn't be paying for the mistakes that idiots and even sensible clockers make. I'm surprised people haven't thought of this earlier, it'd be so easy to set this up, simply have resistors in the chip that blow at various voltages, then to test you just pass current through the test points and if current won't pass then you know it's been overclocked. Just to give crappy PWM some leeway, 1.4 volts would be sufficient.

[Cuthalu]

I hate when people are trying to take advantage of it by RMA it when they killed CPUs. Not very ethical.

Yes, but if it would die anyways, whether oc'd or not. Then it's a bad situation for the consumer. :/

[theteamaqua]

its just pure retailer, etailer speculation.

[LyP0]

What about the motherboards that automatically set a higher fsb e.g. my old abit used to register 271 fsb at stock setting instead of 266 and the cpu freq was obviously slightly higher than stock by default this could be seen with cpuz and the bios. This would mean that the mb manufacturer overclocked my cpu not me so who's to blame now and if i was refused an rma because of this can i claim of my mb manufacturer? Granted not much of an overclock but whats an overclock and what isnt?

indeed. And i bevielve some asus mainbords do the same thing.

[irev210]

regardless, intel makes it very clear that overclocking voids warranty even though people have RMA'd and still been given replacements.


Besides, it takes some talent to kill a CPU with just air cooling on these core 2 duo's

[revenant]

So they know if the Cherry has been popped now. interesting, but I doubt it because people would be complaining about this.

lol.. pop cherry? black box?? begs the question if it's code name was hymen.

[deathman20]

I always hold to if you overclock it and burn it, your fault, don't RMA it.

Indeed.

regardless, intel makes it very clear that overclocking voids warranty even though people have RMA'd and still been given replacements.


Besides, it takes some talent to kill a CPU with just air cooling on these core 2 duo's

Well sucks that you can't put aftermarket cooling on a CPU without voiding warrenty since stock coolers suck anyways. It is easy thought to fry a chip on air surely anyone can do it, crappy cooler no fan it can be done.


So many people RMA over clocked cpu's its horrible. They straight out admit it yet its about a 50/50 split of people in the thread that say its ok and say don't do it, your fault your problem to buy a new one.

[LowRun]

Buying used CPUs would become very risky if a strict policy was set up around this kind of tech

[Qkjhfhaiguihfma]

What about the motherboards that automatically set a higher fsb e.g. my old abit used to register 271 fsb at stock setting instead of 266 and the cpu freq was obviously slightly higher than stock by default this could be seen with cpuz and the bios. This would mean that the mb manufacturer overclocked my cpu not me so who's to blame now and if i was refused an rma because of this can i claim of my mb manufacturer? Granted not much of an overclock but whats an overclock and what isnt?

indeed. And i bevielve some asus mainbords do the same thing.

i seriously doubt intel would give you a hard time for that. but to all the n00bs who buy a new chip, break it doing something stupid, then they don't deserve a replacement.

[nn_step]

I wonder where it's stored on the chip and if the value can be changed.

You wouldn't want to do that, since it is a safety limit to prevent the CPU from clocking past the point where it is reliable(in ideal conditions).

Intel knows if you overclocked



Source

so what else is new?

[kiwi]

Some MBs keep oc settings as well They can fail in a way you can't erase settings even with clear CMOS and battery removal. Intel BX is one of them

[Budwise]

nowhere that i read does it say that there is a physical "black box" that will tell Intel whether you OCed or not. I doubt such thing exists. However they probably can put it under an electron microscope or something and be able to tell if you have overvolted the hell out of it. My guess is that they are now "looking for evidence" of excessive overclocking/overvolting when accepting an RMA. Manufacturers will get you to believe anything if it will possibly save them a buck including scaring people from overclocking by dangling their warranty over their heads... My 2 pennies...

[deathman20]

Some MBs keep oc settings as well They can fail in a way you can't erase settings even with clear CMOS and battery removal. Intel BX is one of them

The saved profiles on some mobo's don't get erased unless theres a bios flash. Even then sometimes depending on the flash or mobo it still keeps those settings even.

[ted3]

It is easy thought to fry a chip on air surely anyone can do it, crappy cooler no fan it can be done

Did you try? Im with irev on this one. I kind of "tried" when testing throttling on E6600, i let it run for a while on 1.6v without fan and it did what Intel says it should do, throttling nicely and didnt get any hotter. If it still gets hotter it will shut down to save its life. This been around since the early Pentium 4 and been proven to work, should be even better in newer CPUs. Im sure theres a way to kill a healthy CPU on a healthy MB but no EASY way. =)

Im for restricted warranty for OC'ers, no doubt lots of mainboards and RAM is killed and there should be a few dead CPUs around too. BUT the source here, OMG, fudzilla has a way of coming over stuff that reputated HW sites cant, that tells me he is adjusting his eyes to conclude what he want to conclude. "Ok, someone waited weeks for an RMA for Intel, and oh, there was a plane crash in Indonesia not long ago, theyre analysing the black box now. And how can i generate traffic to fudzilla.com now?" Pretend you took a few phonecalls (whos to say you didnt?) and dont refer to any sources and its ok, FUD suddenly turned into "news".

[Revv23]

so if my intel CPU dies i have to wait 3-5 weeks to get a replacement?

That isnt going to work for me at all. BS.

not that you can kill an intel cpu easily (2 dead amd chips, 0 intel) but still, sucks.

like budwise said they dont have a black box, they can tell what makes failed cpu's fail though. i would imagine usually they only analyze a few to look for defects, but perhaps as a form of QC it makes sense for them to check every cpu, this would prevent overclocked cpu's from getting through, but in the end i highly doubt overclocking contributes much to dead cpu's. remember overclockers are a very very very small market segment.

i would venture a guess that poor voltage regulation and low qulaity PSU's cause a huge amount more CPU deaths then overclocking.

[safan80]

You wouldn't want to do that, since it is a safety limit to prevent the CPU from clocking past the point where it is reliable(in ideal conditions).

Yeah I know you woudn't want to do it. I just want to know how it works. Is it an alarm that gets tripped or does it store real data?

[mnewxcv]

This is a very unfair way of doing the business as the companies does not oppose to overclocking at least not officially.

where ISNT it stated that ocing voids warranty?

[nn_step]

Yeah I know you woudn't want to do it. I just want to know how it works. Is it an alarm that gets tripped or does it store real data?

it is a simple switch in most cases, so that the manufacture and use it as a factor to decide what caused failure in the product. there are probably about 128 such switches, which are used to detect separate problems. To quickly find and solve ANY manufacturing problems quickly.

[xlink]

Agreed, and IMO the RMA SHOULD be denied. The warranty on a retail CPU is only with the stock cooler at stock clocks, anything else you take the risk into your own hands.

what if you OCed it ran it through prime watched it crash, lowered it to stock and watched it crash and determined that you got a poor chip that isn't even reliable at stock?

[KoHaN69]

That's bullshiet. Who ever buys a video card or processor and doesn't overclock is getting financially raped by the manufacturer.

I bet many of you would have a different opinion if this applied to video cards. oh wait! the manufacturer gives you TOOLS to OVERCLOCK your video cards!
-_-

And how can say AMD prove that you overclocked or that their Cool n quiet f---ed up?

[thecoldanddark]

AMD will also know if you have overclocked with Barcelona, because change the corespeed will change something in the ppl code.
But i didn't know Intel CPU's had a black box , but i lapped my connie anyway

I lap my cpu just to keep me honest.