Perhaps not everybody has fond memories of overclocking past architectures with jumpers on motherboards and needing to be able to do math to determine what overclock you want and more importantly if it took or if the system bailed back to default clocks.  Those days are behind us now, as the BIOS becomes the UEFI and you can use a mouse to affect changes on your system timings.  Bulldozer does offer some complexity to those looking for a challenge but for most it is the unlocked Sandy Bridge processors that are the go to chip for overclockers.  According to information VR-Zone picked up at IDF, overclocking the upcoming families of processors will be even easier.  Intel has changed quite a bit over recent years, from the extreme of locking all their processor frequencies to making it easy for the enthusiast to push their CPU beyond design specs.

"Ivy Bridge CPUs decouple the main clock finally, following what the coming Sandy Bridge – E Socket 2011 is also implementing. Now, you can overclock the cores and memory without worrying about affecting the I/O and PCIe clocks. But then comes the more interesting piece news. A year later, in early 2013, the pinnacle of Intel’s 22 nm process show off, the initial Haswell processor, is expected to go another step further, where CPU core, GPU, memory, PCI and DMI ratios are all set independently here, on top of fine grain BCLK base clock available within the Lynx Point chipset."

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