Posted on Wednesday, April 23 2008 @ 0:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Is Intel going to shoot itself in the foot? According
FUD Zilla the chip giant may no longer allow overclocking on mainstream Nehalem processors. The site claims only the LGA1366 Bloomfield platform will have support for overclocking and that users with Lynnfield and Havendale LGA1160 processors won't be able to torture their chips anymore.
Below the Bloomfield is the Lynnfield and Havendale processors, both using the LGA1160 socket. Neither of these are likely to get any overclocking abilities, although we're not sure how Intel can prevent third party motherboard manufacturers from adding overclocking features to their boards.
However, with most of the northbridge being located inside the CPU of these models, it might be possible for Intel to make some changes as to what the BIOS can access and how the bus speed is controlled. If this is indeed the case, then this is very sad news for all enthusiasts, as it means that a huge group of users will never be able to afford to buy an overclockable platform, from Intel that is.
It seems quite unlikely that you won't be able to overclock Nehalem processors, perhaps this will only be true on Intel's own desktop motherboards.
