Intel's P45 Chipset Is Not Much of an Overclocker

Intel's currently unreleased P45 chipset is rumored to be a hard kill for those who want to squeeze all the best from their rig. According to a news report published by tech magazine BitTech, (quoting Tony Leach from OCZ Technology), the chipset is extremely picky to the minor BIOS tweaks.

According to Leach The P45 chipset borrows many features already present in the high-end X48 chipset and there are plenty of settings that must be precisely aligned for a worth mentioning speed gain. He also claims that a successful overclocking procedure involves tampering with GTL reference voltages, CPU VTT, Clock Skews and CPU PLL voltages.

Leach claims that the new Front Side Bus speeds easily go out of sync and pushing more volts into the chip won't necessarily bring the desired performance boost. The only solution to get your neat overclock is to spend a lot of time experimenting with miscellaneous BIOS settings such as CPU VTT and CPU PLL.

This is not only a painstaking process, but pushing the voltage limits over the safety railing is likely to get your CPU killed, along with other hardware components. The bad thing is that overclocking a P45-based motherboard is an intimate and unique process and perfectly aligned parameters for a system will be worthless if repeated on another computer.

To carry the insanity one step further, the same settings applied to a perfectly identical hardware configuration won't have any spectacular effect, as hardware components are not identical in terms of specifications if the two products are part of different batches.

Leach, the OCZ guy that spends all his time tweaking and tampering with motherboards from top-tier manufacturers, said that each hardware component is unique and works at slightly different specifications from its siblings. He said that no two processors are identical, although they share the same model and brand. This also applies to graphics cards, RAM modules, and even motherboards.

Intel is making its products less overclockable and this is extremely curious, given the fact that its processors were known as great and stable overclockers, even when paired with budget cooling solutions. If we take into account early rumors about Intel's upcoming Nehalem family, lower-end parts will not overclock at all, except for the flagship Bloomfield offerings.