Ah, sad times. Still a good little CPU for the money.

I can see AMD limiting overclocking and under clocking their graphics cards out the box to give the same misleading impression Nvidia gives. They do themselves no favours allowing enthusiasts the ability to overclock but when they take it away people complain but if they keep the option open people complain about power. Loose loose.

Considering that there are 220GE and 240GE...

Pimpiklem:

I can see AMD limiting overclocking and under clocking their graphics cards out the box to give the same misleading impression Nvidia gives. They do themselves no favours allowing enthusiasts the ability to overclock but when they take it away people complain but if they keep the option open people complain about power. Loose loose.

That's because these aren't enthusiast products... they're entry level budget products. You're basically complaining that a product can't do something that it shouldn't be able to do in the first place.

So now you're a proponent of having separate overclockable enthusiast chips and vanilla non-overclockable ones? I could have sworn i remember you beating up on Intel over doing this with K and non-K product lines. If I am mistaken, my apologies. That is though an often repeated criticism of Intel by the AMD crowd.

These are not i5 &i7 cpus, and it was rather recent that the i3 was available with a k version. What are you barking about? Nice low end chips. @Andrew LB

Andrew LB:

So now you're a proponent of having separate overclockable enthusiast chips and vanilla non-overclockable ones? I could have sworn i remember you beating up on Intel over doing this with K and non-K product lines. If I am mistaken, my apologies. That is though an often repeated criticism of Intel by the AMD crowd.

I don't recall ever saying such a thing. I'm perfectly fine with Intel's mobile CPUs, Celerons, Xeons and low-end parts having no overclockability, because OCing them is generally a stupid idea for these. That's most of Intel's product lineup which I feel shouldn't be able to OC. As Embra pointed out, we're talking cheap low-end hardware here. As far as I'm concerned, an i5 or i7 with a locked multiplier is purely artificial. You could argue that maybe the silicon quality isn't as great, but in the vast majority of cases, people run into thermal or power issues before silicon quality affects their overclock. So when it comes to high-end hardware, putting a limit on overclocking is kinda dumb.

austin865a:

Locked multi =/= cant overclock.

Getting 5MHz on the BCLK is not really an overclock worth mentioning...

schmidtbag:

Getting 5MHz on the BCLK is not really an overclock worth mentioning...

And board capable to do that is not something you would put 200GE on anyway. Those GE chips go to prebuilt systems for offices.