Should AMD leave their CPU's unlocked?

[Whalefish]

All cpus should be locked the same as all cars should be fited with tamper proof fasteners so you can't make them any faster. If you want a faster car you should buy one.........what a load of nonsense. I have a P166 that has been running at 200mhz since I bought it from new. I am pretty sure Intel has never lost any sleep nor much revenue from my having overclocked it.
Half the fun of owning a computer is seeing how much performance you can squeeze out of what you have. If you blow up a cpu, well it's one more chip the manufacturer gets to sell to replace it. Factor in all the idiots who fry theirs in the process of hamfisted overclocking, I'd guess they actually make money from overclocking rather than losing it.

[Swafe]

the thing is would it really benfit ?

sure, ok, we would like it, we would buy AMD if they unlocked it but would they make that much more cash ?

lets be honest, if they were all unlocked, the FX series would just become another XP chip, just faster so what you say? well that means no extra cash they can charge on top of the normal


and for what? enthusiants

honestly, how is pc world so crap, yet gets billions of revenue ? answer - the average jo just goes there for their pc, no hassel, and they dumbos in there make out there getting the deal of the century - we will throw in a usb lead for your printer if you buy this pc?

ohh wow what a bargain seing as they will cost me 20 quid ! mega deal must buy !

if there unlocked, noone will care apart from 5%-10% of people, probably isnt all that worth it any more for them if they did unlock them - if intel started selling unlocked cpus i wouldnt personally be bother, im no longer in it for a stupidly high spec pc, my current system is a unlocked 1700 that does 2.4ghz ....but i run it at stock..

[iranu]

It would be interesting for AMD/Intel to comment on this. Could the powers of Hexus get the big two to comment? Was the xp1700 JIUHB chip a marketing ploy or just enthusiasts getting wise? Selling £60 quid chips is better than not selling £100 chips especially when the cash is going to your competitor! Overclocking has always been for the enthusiast market, which is a very small market indeed compared with corporate purchases.

Agent, as usual, has hit the nail on the head - let the board, on boot up, register a genuine overclock so the layman knows his chip was overclocked by the store that sold him the pc. An enthusiast will (nearly) always be pursuaded by best value, so letting them squeeze those extra Mhz out (and tell their friends) isn't going to matter to the bottom line and may well just increase it.

[Howard]

From the manufacturer's point of view leaving the lesser chips unlocked so they can match the power of their faster chips could be a bad thing. They'll lose the profits they'd make by selling the more expensive chips. Then the only solution would be to lower the price of the faster ones, and still losing money...

Then again there are plenty of people still buying them I suppose. I saw plenty of folk with "proper" 3200+ CPUs when the "2500+ to 3200" craze was around. Seems a bit silly to pay more for the same thing to me but hey.

I guess I'm looking at it from an overclockers and a business' point of view

[DR]

The trouble is we are 2% of the market (or so) think about it - hwat happens when your mother or family buy a PC from a system builder who has put a modified CPU in it - which they would be non the wiser it has happened.

It would make it too easy for people to be unethical.

[DaftpuNk]

I voted yes, unlock them. Do you know why? No, it's not for overclocking. It's for that other magical science!

Yes, you've guessed it. Underclocking! What better way of making a quiet running office computer for businesses than buying chips and running them slower! Granny doesn't need a 2GHz processor, so clock it down and see those office apps run fine.

Either way the clock speed goes, up or down, AMD have allowed the enthusiast community to play with the figures very easily. Why hasn't someone whipped the heatspreaders off to see if we can do anything with multipliers this generation? I've not heard any negative or positive news on that front.

But ignore all this. I don't care for the fastest processor at the moment. I don't care for the fastest graphics card right now either. The bottleneck is still the storage front of things, bring me faster hard disks ANY day of the week! Simple file copying procedures of backing up an MP3 collection take immense amounts of time. That's where technology research and development teams really should be spending their time, and none of this "wee 300MB/sec" SATAII rubbish either. Wow your interface is fast, but can the drives maintain this transfer rate? Er, no!

[Zak33]

DaftpuNK nails another situation....bang on. Storage. But thats for another day I feel.

Underclocking is also a very very good thought.

However....David, being the boss, is right

smart sod

[Platinum]

But is it?

Nope, look at me, next week ill be buying a FX55 and ill be O/C'ing it

[pumbertot]

basically as long as you have good mem you can still overclock every athlon64 cpu etc to their full potential and run 1:1 for best performance. there really is no excuse these days for not being able to and a lower multi with a higher HTT especially at 1:! is so much faster. Currently running an fx-53 and its really the L2 cache which puts it above other s939s. I could clock my 3500 to a similar overall clockspeed regardless of not being able to put the multi above 11. In fact at 10.5x and 250HTT the system was so much faster anyhow. Why would you want multis of 12x,13x etc unless you have either crap memory(get an upgrade then ) or an unber rare clocking chip with the utilization of phase-change cooling and a vcore mod.

...........my 10p.

I also killed a 2500 barton with 2.1V up its rear vapochilled. Was a beaut of a chip did 2.8GHz. R.I.P uber barton.

[Krieg-Maschine]

[QUOTE=DaftpuNk]I voted yes, unlock them. Do you know why? No, it's not for overclocking. It's for that other magical science!

Yes, you've guessed it. Underclocking! What better way of making a quiet running office computer for businesses than buying chips and running them slower! Granny doesn't need a 2GHz processor, so clock it down and see those office apps run fine.
QUOTE]

I Disagree about the Underclocking. Seriously it would be really dumb to pay a lot for a processor which took you quite a while to earn the money for, then underclock it to make it slower... if you really want ur expensive fast computer to be "not loud and cool/not hot", get an Asus motherboard and use Cool & Quiet technology. I use it on my Athlon64 3000+ so my computer is unclocked from 2000ghz to 1ghz so it get very cool and I can keep my fan running (by a remote button) on minimum to make less noise possible and keep cpu "cold". Right now I'm at, 35C cpu and motherboard and fan is ever at 2300RPM. Ah forgot to say that this feature clock back the cpu to 2000ghz when i'm loading application, playing games etc...

[Rave]

Why hasn't someone whipped the heatspreaders off to see if we can do anything with multipliers this generation? I've not heard any negative or positive news on that front.

Been done. There's nowt under there unfortunately. A64s are downwards multiplier unlocked, so underclocking is still pretty easy.

Rich :¬)

[DR]

The trouble is AMD have a buis model - Intel have been 'screwed' by having unlocked CPUs in the past- there was talk of Intel making EE's unlocked as default, due to, at the end of the day people paying top dollar for them - not worth remarking them.

But remember Celeron 266s and 300s which clocked to 400 and 450 easily

[javalord]

AMD should have BIOS manufacturers implement a BIG BIG warning when overclocked as someone mentioned about for Intel systems.

Yes, someone could re-code the BIOS so it doesnt have the message, but if one's going to sell overclocked PCs in the first place, I doubt he/she has the brains to think that ahead.

To be honest , a substantial AMD sales do come from bored enthusiasts who do nothing but tweak and overclock till they can get there very best FPS. So why damage your markets cash cows?

And before someone picks on me for saying bored enthusiast, enthusiast, ask yourself what the hell have you done productive wise lately, with that shinny pc of yours?

Yeah, I thought so.

[fRostiE]

Yes, they should leave them unlocked

free speed is good... why pay £100 more for a 3800 AMD64 when you can have a 3500 that does 3800 speeds

[Kumagoro]

Anyone can surely see why they lock them, it makes commercial sense for them now. Seeing as they have a much improved rep, not being slower then the intel equiv now.

Do i like it... do i bollocks.

Maybe if they left the top speed cpu in every range unlocked that would be a reasonable compromise.

[Applecrusher]

Maybe if they left the top speed cpu in every range unlocked that would be a reasonable compromise.

Well, as said above, they leave the FX cpus unlocked..

But they should introduce a CPU that doesnt cost as much that is unlocked..
Are there any athlon 64 mobiles? and if so are they unlocked?