Jaydee - that long post of yours was right on the mark. There are way too many idiots running websites out there and not enough intelligent people doing something about it (not that there's anything they can do about it for the most part - but thats another discussion)
But what really scares me is how much most of the people here seem to like Ed's editorial about it on overclockers. Now don't take this as me trying to defend the ipkonfig article at all - the author of that is one of the idiots I mentioned in the first paragraph. But I think Ed at overclockers is also one of the biggest and most arrogant idiots out there and he's managed to build a large audience for his ranting anyways. It was only a couple weeks ago I was reading something else at overclockers (also by Ed) where he was the one complaining about the overclockability of A64's (it's not in my IE history anymore and I don't feel like searching any harder than that for a link).
In this latest editorial most of his points seem to come from the third and fourth of his "principles of overclocking", which are:
Quote:
*To ensure a negligible percentage of product failures, CPU manufacturers aim towards making the vast majority of their CPUs capable of running under normal working conditions at speeds which are near, at, or above their highest rated CPU. They don't always succeed in this, but that is their goal, which they usually make sooner or later.
*CPU manufacturers generally rate most of their CPUs at speeds which are somewhat to considerably lower than the CPUs maximum potential speed. Generally, the lower the rated speed for a certain technology, the higher the potential overclock.
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Obviously the second of these is not so much a principle but a result of the first. And the first one (third in original article) is an incorrect assumption. The real goal of a CPU manufacturer is to have as high a yield as possible at at least the speed of the most in-demand chip. If only 5% of them are stable at the highest speed, but that is sufficient to supply the demand for that speed, then there's really not a lot of motivation to tweak the process (which is difficult and expensive - though they are likely doing it for other reasons eg. prep to release a new speed of chip). To put it very simply, down-binning most/all of your production (as Ed claims is their goal) is not making efficient use of your resources. I'm guessing Ed's been spoiled lately by the AthlonXP's and P4's which are now both very mature products and has forgotten what its like to OC something new.