Intel Haswell to deliver new overclocking features

Intel talked about overclocking at last week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The chip giant showed over 70 presentation slides detailing how to overclock Sandy Bridge(-E) and Ivy Bridge processors, and explained the overclocking enhancements that the upcoming Haswell architecture will bring to the table.

Legit Reviews dug into the slides and reports Haswell will improve upon the real-time overclocking made possible by Ivy Bridge. Besides being able to change the CPU and and IGP clock rations, as well as the BCLK in small increments, Haswell will also enable BCLK coarse ratio adjusements of 1.00, 1.25 and 1.67, which allow BclK to change without unwanted overclocking of SATA ports and other components.

There will be other great overclocking features too. Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility will have a portable version called Pocket XTU that will allow a user to adjust those clock speeds directly while a game is running, no disruption required. It achieves this by being run from another computer or even a smartphone and controlling the target computer over the network. This is some serious convenience and will help greatly with performance benchmarking in games. Even overclocking on laptops is to be officially supported, with Intel sanctioning the use of overclocking features such as turbo buttons on the system case on top of the improvements explained above.