The Sandy Bridge Preview (Anand)

[JumpingJack]

i mentioned that back in the thread and im suprised people on xs would ok with lack of overclocking choice.

yeah ... however, if Intel serves up K skus for reasonable costs it will make up for their decision a little.

But I, like many, believe that for the enthusiast community this is a poor move. I can see both sides of the argument. Enthusiast want the option to void their warranty and push to the limits. They want the most performance for the least cost.

The other side of the argument is Intel wants to make money every public corporation does (and Intel obviously really wants to make money, lots of it )... so they have 2-3% of the market (DYIer overclockers) asking for liberally peppered cheap skus to overclock, where has they have some 80% or more (my guess) who wants to cut system level manufacturing costs.... who do you think they are going to listen to?

AMD unlocked their skus as a nice bonus to attrack more enthusiast over clockers over while they worked on getting better products out to take on Intel's lead ... Intel released K skus to counter this, but imo, was more to make up for the eventual movement of the clock gen on package/die. It is actually quite amazing to me that Intel would even do that considering past behaviors.