Report: Intel's Sandy Bridge Platform Lousy for Overclocking

Posted 07/23/2010 at 6:00am | by Paul Lilly

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Reports have begun to surface that Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors are going to be poor overclockers, allowing for only 2-3 percent of OCing headroom before the platform falls flat on its face.

The reason for this is because all of the system buses are going to be tied together in Sandy Bridge, including USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, and so forth. The way things work now is you're able to goose additional MHz out of your CPU and memory without affecting other subsets, but that apparently won't be the case with Sandy Bridge, which will use a single internal clock generator linking all the buses together.

As Bit-Tech reports it, at least one Taiwanese motherboard company warned that cranking the Base Clock by just 5MHz is enough to throw a wrench into the whole operation, causing the USB to fail and corrupt the SATA bus.

It's still early, however, and mobo makers could come up with workarounds, but so far it doesn't appear as though Intel is too interested in lending a hand.

Full story here.

Image Credit: Bit-Tech.net