As someone who likes to overclock and someone who likes Intel’s’ CPU’s this isn’t the best news I’ve had today.
On a more positive note Intel still plans to sell its K-series processors which come with an unlocked CPU multiplier. Even so I bet this news has put a smile on AMD’s collective face.
Information provided by Intel in its own presentations about its upcoming mainstream LGA1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs appears to confirm the company has designed the CPUs to deliberately limit overclocking.
A video to HKEPC and posted on YouTube (see from 2mins onwards) confirms the fact that only a 2-3 per cent OC via Base Clock adjustments will be possible. This is because Intel has tied the speed of every bus (USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, Uncore, memory etc) to a single internal clock generator issuing the basic 100MHz Base Clock.