Intel Skylake Non-K Overclock Dropped By ASRock

Megalith

Megalith

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This is the first evidence of Intel pushing motherboard vendors to remove the overclocking of non-K Skylake processor capabilities from their feature lists.

…ASRock has updated its Intel Z170 motherboards with two tweaks; 1. Update CPU microcode to 0x76, and 2. Remove SKY OC function. There is no explanation of either tweak in a BIOS read-me file or similar, or any blog or social media post. An earlier BIOS update from ASRock, just a fortnight ago, included a microcode to fix the Skylake complex workloads bug. Older BIOS versions remain on the ASRock website.
 
Now that AMD is no longer a competitor, we return to the old days of Intel,doing whatever the hell they want. This is the start. Soon we will see the return of grossly overpriced processors after a nice long period of getting decently priced Intel processors at the mainstream level.
 
AMD's last chance is Zen. They really need to start competing on every level with Intel, though it doesn't seem likely with that R&D budget as small as it is. Blocking any kind of OC unless you buy the chips they want you to? Sounds like like they already don't have any competition. I guess with AMD share prices at 2 bucks, they haven't for a while.
 
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
 
On one hand. Sucks for non k people. I'm the other hand I understand Intel protecting themselves from potential warranty issues and support issues that come from oc'ing.
 
amdgamer said:
Now that AMD is no longer a competitor, we return to the old days of Intel,doing whatever the hell they want.
Click to expand...

Unlike the good old days when the Athlon 64 stomped the shit out of the Pentium 4... and Intel went on doing whatever the hell they wanted.

AMD is too small to matter.
 
Darkswordz said:
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Overclocking itself was never an intended feature to begin with :rolleyes:
 
Darkswordz said:
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Yeah, actually it was, genius.
Even though the multiplier is locked on non-K CPUs, one can and should be able to OC on any processor they want, considering, you know, they own the hardware.

I don't remember reading anywhere stating that consumer-grade hardware from Intel is licensed, meaning one should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
You really don't remember what things were like when CPUs were $1000+ for a mid-range model; history repeats itself.
 
I'm not impressed with ASRocks BIOS updates.

I have a Z170 Extreme 4+ and a 6600K.
With early BIOS versions I can get 4.7GHz ""rock"" stable.
Anything past Bios V1.5 (now at V2.4) I cannot get above 4.5GHz stable, 4.6GHz doesnt even let me boot windows!
I've tested every release to try and get my Corsair ram to run at rated speed (it never does) and always go back to V1.5
Hmph.
 
Remember the days of unlocking AMD's with a pencil? Too bad that kind of simplicity doesn't exist anymore.
 
Darkswordz said:
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Why exactly are you a member of this forum?
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Remember the days of unlocking AMD's with a pencil? Too bad that kind of simplicity doesn't exist anymore.
Click to expand...

Ahh, those really were the days... But I'm not shocked at Intels tactics, as they have only ever payed lip-service to the overclocking community.
 
Darkswordz said:
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Excuse me but overclocking was never ever an intended feature. We do it because its possible. Because we are enthusiasts. Prior to so called K series. This is how we overclocked. For you to sit here and say this, you should be banned from speaking in life permanently. You don't belong here sir. This is HARDOCP. We don't need anyone's permission to push boundaries and break limits.
 
Red Falcon said:
Yeah, actually it was, genius.
Even though the multiplier is locked on non-K CPUs, one can and should be able to OC on any processor they want, considering, you know, they own the hardware.

I don't remember reading anywhere stating that consumer-grade hardware from Intel is licensed, meaning one should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
You really don't remember what things were like when CPUs were $1000+ for a mid-range model; history repeats itself.
Click to expand...

When were mid-range CPU's ever $1000+ ?

There was a time when AMD was charging more their the A64s and X2's than Intel charged for their products. I paid $350+ for a X2 3800+, the 4400+ was almost $600, and the 4800+ and FX-62 were ~$1000.

By comparison, the Pentium D 850
 
(accidentally hit post before I was done)

By comparison the Pentium D 840 and 960 were about $500.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Remember the days of unlocking AMD's with a pencil? Too bad that kind of simplicity doesn't exist anymore.
Click to expand...

I overclocked my first gen Mac Mini (PowerPC) by unsoldering the right combination of resistors on the motherboard.....was pretty exciting making that kind of a commitment :eek:
 
ryan_975 said:
When were mid-range CPU's ever $1000+ ?

There was a time when AMD was charging more their the A64s and X2's than Intel charged for their products. I paid $350+ for a X2 3800+, the 4400+ was almost $600, and the 4800+ and FX-62 were ~$1000.

By comparison, the Pentium D 850
Click to expand...

That spurred increased competition and Intel went back to the drawing board and brought us some insane bargains as a result. Before Intel realized how badly AMD dropped the ball, we had some nice deals and especially so for those of us who have Micro Centers next to us. Now they have the opportunity to go unchallenged yet again.

Zen is it. I believe AMD will be out of cash at that point. It makes me sick to think that AMD and ATI could be going off into Oblivion never to return.

I always had a dislike for Intel while respecting them. It was nice to see the little underdog come up and catch Intel sleeping and butt naked. My heart broke when Bulldozer came out and it was just a disaster for all but a few specialized applications. My heart breaks thinking what could happen if ATI is gone and NVidia is free to do whatever the hell they want. I respect Intel, but I have no respect for NVidia even though I have owned just as many NVidia based video cards as ATI.
 
amdgamer said:
Now that AMD is no longer a competitor, we return to the old days of Intel,doing whatever the hell they want. This is the start. Soon we will see the return of grossly overpriced processors after a nice long period of getting decently priced Intel processors at the mainstream level.
Click to expand...

They were doing this kind of stuff even when AMD was competitive. They might do it even more when AMD isn't competitive though.

I'm not sure how much they could actually raise prices at this point either. At a certain point PCs would become too expensive for regular consumers and people would just buy ARM-based tablets/chromebooks instead.

In a situation where AMD goes bankrupt I'd actually be more worried about Nvidia jacking up prices. Unlike CPUs only enthusiasts/gamers really buy graphics cards. If that does ever happen hopefully someone can buy the ATI/AMD graphics portion of the company.
 
Darkswordz said:
Overclocking of non-K processors was never an intended feature to begin with. People are crying that a feature has been taken away they were never supposed to have in the first place. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

This is generally not how humans are observed operating in the wild.

prius_rally_car.jpg
 
amdgamer said:
I always had a dislike for Intel while respecting them. It was nice to see the little underdog come up and catch Intel sleeping and butt naked.
Click to expand...

Yep, just make no mistake that the Pentium 4 (Netburst) and RAMBUS was only Intel sleeping. It wasn't that they couldn't do better, they just got lazy and decided not to. Once they got their head out of their ass, they gave us one of the biggest upsets we've seen in a long time (Core). They just needed to be reminded not to slow down.

The only real saving grace I see for AMD was AMD64 technology. Had they not had that, Intel probably would have squashed them out of existence a long time ago. Intel could have easily pulled the x86 license away and left AMD dry, but they knew they couldn't get consumers to make a flat out move to 64 bit.
 
westrock2000 said:
Yep, just make no mistake that the Pentium 4 (Netburst) and RAMBUS was only Intel sleeping. It wasn't that they couldn't do better, they just got lazy and decided not to. Once they got their head out of their ass, they gave us one of the biggest upsets we've seen in a long time (Core). They just needed to be reminded not to slow down.

The only real saving grace I see for AMD was AMD64 technology. Had they not had that, Intel probably would have squashed them out of existence a long time ago. Intel could have easily pulled the x86 license away and left AMD dry, but they knew they couldn't get consumers to make a flat out move to 64 bit.
Click to expand...

Intel wasn't sleeping. They were playing the market's misunderstanding that MHz meant something. They thought they could reach 10GHz, and if they'd done that, then nothing AMD did would have mattered, not AMD64, not dual-cores, not IMC. But fortunately for AMD, the laws of physics kept getting in Intel's way.
 
amdgamer said:
Now that AMD is no longer a competitor, we return to the old days of Intel,doing whatever the hell they want. This is the start. Soon we will see the return of grossly overpriced processors after a nice long period of getting decently priced Intel processors at the mainstream level.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but this is simply untrue. Intel will still have to keep the processor pricing realistic for market conditions. People aren't suddenly going to be willing to buy Core i7 6700k's at $599 when they can be had for less than $349.99 today. If Intel does that, they'll end up with stock they can't move and they'll end up slashing prices anyway just to get rid of the inventory. People have enjoyed sub-$1,000 PCs for way too long to go back to the pricing model of the early 2000's.
 
amdgamer said:
Now that AMD is no longer a competitor, we return to the old days of Intel,doing whatever the hell they want. This is the start. Soon we will see the return of grossly overpriced processors after a nice long period of getting decently priced Intel processors at the mainstream level.
Click to expand...

Sure they are. Wait until Zen and Poseidon are launched.
 
I actually miss the good old days when overclocking had to be done by jumper combinations. Or Voltage modding the cpu by shorting it's pins.

What actually happened is intel made overclocking a mainstream feature, instead of a fringe possibility to [H] people. And they decided to put a price tag on it, thus the K cpu line was born. Now it's understandable that they want to keep overclocking there because if you can OC a non-K cpu, then most people are not going to pay the extra for the K cpu.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. Restricting OC to the most expensive CPU line is kind of a middle finger to people with less money to burn. While I was in school, I lived off cheap CPUs that were great overclockers. Now if you're a student with little money you're shit out of luck, because intel doesn't give a fuck.
 
ryan_975 said:
When were mid-range CPU's ever $1000+ ?

There was a time when AMD was charging more their the A64s and X2's than Intel charged for their products. I paid $350+ for a X2 3800+, the 4400+ was almost $600, and the 4800+ and FX-62 were ~$1000.

By comparison, the Pentium D 850
Click to expand...

Go back 20-30 years ago.
You won't believe how expensive Intel 80386DX and 80486DX, and Motorola 68030 and 68040 CPUs were from the mid-80s to the mid-90s.
 
Our first 386 motherboards from Taiwan were over £1000 each.
Add inflation to that.
And 2 got killed by incompatible I/O cards!
Incompatibility was very common, tougher to deal with and very costly in those days.
 
This is REALLY upsetting news.

Essentially, Intel is making an effort to stop overclockers so they can maximise profit, the smaller, 'locked' chips were putting up a fight against the 'unlocked' K series chips. It's the same situation Microsoft found themselves in with XP vs 7 and 7 VS 10: What a nice feeling when your biggest competitor is yourself.
 
Dan_D said:
Sorry, but this is simply untrue. Intel will still have to keep the processor pricing realistic for market conditions. People aren't suddenly going to be willing to buy Core i7 6700k's at $599 when they can be had for less than $349.99 today. If Intel does that, they'll end up with stock they can't move and they'll end up slashing prices anyway just to get rid of the inventory. People have enjoyed sub-$1,000 PCs for way too long to go back to the pricing model of the early 2000's.
Click to expand...

I don't think Intel moves enough in volume on the high end for it to matter. Their bread and butter are low to mid range and 2S servers. In addition considering $599 is what most new video cards go for I don't really see why they wouldn't.
 
Dan_D said:
Sorry, but this is simply untrue. Intel will still have to keep the processor pricing realistic for market conditions. People aren't suddenly going to be willing to buy Core i7 6700k's at $599 when they can be had for less than $349.99 today. If Intel does that, they'll end up with stock they can't move and they'll end up slashing prices anyway just to get rid of the inventory. People have enjoyed sub-$1,000 PCs for way too long to go back to the pricing model of the early 2000's.
Click to expand...

Remember back when the Extreme Edition chips were essentially unlocked versions of the top-tier Xeons? The cost $1000, but they were the absolute fastest and most powerful chips you could get. The 775 EE Chips were just unlocked 771 Xeons, the EE i7 980 was just an unlocked 1366 Xeon. Same core count, same cache, same QPI, even.

Can you get an unlocked version of Intel's 18-core Xeons? No? But you are still paying $1000 for an unlocked 8-core i7(less than half the cores of top-tier xeon silicon).

You are right, market pressure means Intel can't charge any more per se, but it DOES allow Intel to offer less at the static price, thus increasing profit.
 
Dan_D said:
Sorry, but this is simply untrue. Intel will still have to keep the processor pricing realistic for market conditions. People aren't suddenly going to be willing to buy Core i7 6700k's at $599 when they can be had for less than $349.99 today. If Intel does that, they'll end up with stock they can't move and they'll end up slashing prices anyway just to get rid of the inventory. People have enjoyed sub-$1,000 PCs for way too long to go back to the pricing model of the early 2000's.
Click to expand...

The dude above I think said what I should have said that they will just get lazy and start offering less at a price point. I agree with you about market forces, but those often get corrupted in a monopoly.

Krenum said:
Sure they are. Wait until Zen and Poseidon are launched.
Click to expand...

What if they run out of money first, and even worse those processors end up being another disaster? Everything I keep reading in the rumor mill does not make me confident. The sad thing is that AMD/ATI could really have potential if someone with the ability to invest massive capital bought them out.
 
You have to pay to play. Otherwise, go AMD since all their processors are unlocked.
 
ManofGod said:
You have to pay to play. Otherwise, go AMD since all their processors are unlocked.
Click to expand...

Intel's current i3 chips are faster for gaming than AMD's best offering. So really if you want to play, people just go Intel and decide how much they want to spend.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Unlike the good old days when the Athlon 64 stomped the shit out of the Pentium 4... and Intel went on doing whatever the hell they wanted.

AMD is too small to matter.
Click to expand...

You mean the days when Intel was paying OEMs to NOT use AMD processors.. They even went as far as telling them that they would not sell to them if they sold AMD based systems.

I sure hope Zen is good.
 
Krenum said:
Exactly, and that right there gives AMD the edge if Intel wants to pull this crap.
Click to expand...

yyeeeaaah no.

As much as Zen MAY change things, AMD's current "unlocked" chips are far FAR sub-par even at their highest, LN2 clockspeeds. A 5.0GHz 9590 hardly keeps up with a first-gen 4770K, and gets passed completely by a stock Skylake i5. Imagine OC'ing that i5...
 
Disappointing, however I'm sure a work-around will be found through a bios mod (at least for this generation). Some enthusiast(s) will reverse engineer the older bios (that still contain the ability to OC) and figure out the omission/change of code. The fix may even be as simple as a few changes in a hex editor or copying over a section of code.

As a few users have posted, maybe mods of the future motherboards will be required to overclock - would be nice to bring back some of the "hands-on" approach to overclocking
 
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