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Roman Hartung, a.k.a. der8auer recently demonstrated that BCLK overclocking is possible on all Alder Lake CPUs, even the lowly Celeron G6900. The catch is (there's always a catch, isn't there) is that it seems to only work on certain rather expensive motherboards, though now that this feature is revealed other motherboard vendors have a good chance of jumping on it.
For those of you too young to remember, back in the good old days only the top of the line $999 'Extreme Edition' ('FX' in AMD's lineup) parts had unlocked multipliers; everything else was overclocked via the base clock, which was linked to most other frequencies in the system. This had a few notable standouts, most notably the Celeron 300A and Core i7-920 which were capable of 50% overclocks, easily surpassing the performance of CPUs two or three times their price.
Things are different now, of course, since stock clocks are through the roof and CPUs are segmented by core count, cache size, and binning, rather than a few hundred MHz difference in clock speeds, but it will still be interesting to see if there are any good deals to be had among the i3's and i5's. It's also pretty great for subzero overclocking, since folks who aren't sponsored can now blow up $59 Celerons in pursuit of world records, rather than $599 Core i9's.
For those of you too young to remember, back in the good old days only the top of the line $999 'Extreme Edition' ('FX' in AMD's lineup) parts had unlocked multipliers; everything else was overclocked via the base clock, which was linked to most other frequencies in the system. This had a few notable standouts, most notably the Celeron 300A and Core i7-920 which were capable of 50% overclocks, easily surpassing the performance of CPUs two or three times their price.
Things are different now, of course, since stock clocks are through the roof and CPUs are segmented by core count, cache size, and binning, rather than a few hundred MHz difference in clock speeds, but it will still be interesting to see if there are any good deals to be had among the i3's and i5's. It's also pretty great for subzero overclocking, since folks who aren't sponsored can now blow up $59 Celerons in pursuit of world records, rather than $599 Core i9's.
