Intel’s Overclocking Protection Plan Revealed

Intel has produced CPUs with unlocked multipliers for a long time now but if you manage to fry your processor in the overclocking process, you’re out of luck. Well, it looks like Intel is about to become a bit more overclocking friendly with their new “Performance Tuning Protection Plan”.

Here’s what Intel has to say about their new “Protection Plan”:

“The Performance Tuning Protection Plan being offered by Intel is a chance for you to experiment with the overclocking features of your processor without the worries of what will happen if you push the procesor too far. The Plan allows you a single processor replacement, hassle-free, from our customer support. This is in addtion to your standard 3 year warranty. In other words, if it fails under normal usage, we will replace it under the standard warranty; if it fails while running outside of Intel’s specifications, we will replace it under the Performance Tuning Protection Plan.

So what we are saying is this: Go ahead and push it, we’ve got your back.”

Yeah, we’re not joking… So, the plans are actually priced quite reasonably between $20.00 for the Intel Core i5-2500K all the way up to $35.00 for the Intel Core i7 3960X. Obviously those looking to overclock say an i5 2500K to something like 4.2GHz or so probably won’t need this, but if you’re planning to do something along the lines of a 24/7 1.52v 5.0GHz overclock, you may want to consider the warranty.

The plan only covers K and X processors with up to 3 years of warranty and it’s for a “one-time” replacement only so make sure to back off those overclocks once you’ve fried your first one.

For those interested, here’s the pricing information on the processors.