Intel plans to screw customers over with their new Sandy Bridge CPU

Actually, this news should make you wonder WHY?

the problem with that is you cant reach a proper overclock because simply adjusting multiplier leads to large jumps in clock speed. for example

Overclocks need to be fine tuned which is why even when people get black edition CPU's from AMD, they still end up using the FSB in overclocking. Also with that intel CPU, not all of the models will have an unlocked multiplier (they will most likely reserve that for the super expensive cores that most people will not be able to afford. and the ones that cant afford it will use the cheaper ones thinking they can just overclock purely on the FSB and other multipliers.

all in all, to reach a fast and stable overclock, you need to use both the multiplier and the FSB. There is more to a CPU than overclocking the main clock speed. To reach the highest clock speed, you will reach a point were you are between 2 multiplier settings, one is too slow and the other is too fast and thus you will pick the slow one and slowly increase the clock speed in smaller increments using the FSB.

You must also increase some of the other clock speeds. I will use an AMD cpu for this example as their clock speeds are easier to work with.

A phenom II x4 955 at 3.8GHz and a HT link speed of 2000 MHz will run games slower than a phenom II x4 955 at 3745MHz and a ht link speed of 2400MHz range (trust me then is generally the difference between the overclock giving you a 20% performance boost and a 25% performance boost)

The goal of overclocking is not purely core clock speed, it is finding a mixture of bus speeds and core clock speeds in order to get the best performance.

sometimes you will have to give up some MHz on the core clock speed but at least in this case, you are trading those few MHz for a boost in clock speed in another part of the CPU in order to get an even larger performance boost.

With intel's new core, users who don't spend an arm and a leg on the super high end versions will not be able to overclock at all and the ones that do will not get as good of overclocks as they are used to seeing from an intel CPU

You're assuming that only whole-multipliers are allowed, but that isn't the case. You can have half and quarter steps between each multiplier, and it's very possible to go more granular than that.

You could have 20x, 20.25x, 20.5x, 20.75x, 21x, and so on and so forth. You aren't restricted to just 20, 21, etc. This should give you a desirable range of clockspeeds with very little dead space in-between.

You're also assuming that the FSB is the only way to overclock certain components. This also isn't true. Components like the HT link speed, RAM clock, and PCIe bus clock do not run synchronous with the FSB. They all have their own separate multipliers and dividers that can be adjusted to control their clockspeed WITHOUT tinkering with the front side bus.

All a motherboard would have to do is provide granular control over these multipliers and dividers. Assuming the CPU core is unlocked, you'll have just as much (and in some ways, more) control than you ever did using the FSB to blanked-adjust everything.

yep, in my previous posts I mentioned the other multipliers. the problem is you generally see .5x steps for the core clock and 1x steps for other things. Either way, it will make overclocking harder as you will still end up with some items being under clocked. For sensitive components such as the sata bus (some motherboards in the bast had them linked to the FSB with no changeable multiplier for them, eg the asus a8v ). Remember at in the case of the article, these are components that can not handle being overclocked. so even if they had a multiplier, it will be nearly impossible to to get a good overclock involving the CPU multiplier as well as a FSB change with out causing other components to run slower. you will basically be making one item faster while making many others slower. And this is something that overclockers hate to do.

the Other problem is these changes are in intels chipset, People will have to wonder, will intel even allow multipliers for these additional components to be adjusted (remember CPU makers don't have much motivation to allow users to overclock low and mid range CPU's as that will take sales away from faster and more expensive CPU's. For example, AMD has the phenom II x4 955 and the x4 965. the 965 barely sold because it had the same everything that the 955 had, only difference was the multiplier being slightly higher. Many stores charged more for the 965

Most people avoided it because the 955 could be overclocked to the same speed easily. and both CPU's had the same max overclock limits.

If you own a tv company and you sell a 40 inch TV and a 60 inch, the 60 inch is $1000 more than the 40 inch. People who want a 60 inch will spend more for it. but if it turned out that the 40 inch was also a 60 inch, the company just taped some cardboard over the edges then zoomed the picture out a little. and the 40 inch should easily become a 60 inch by removing the cardboard going into the options and changing the zoom settings. would people still spend the $1000 extra for the 60 inch or will they buy the 40 inch and just do the quick change to make it into a 60 inch?

CPU companies don't like overclocking for low cost CPU's as it takes sales away from their more expensive CPU's that use the same core technology.

for multipliers to work, they will have to be made in such a way that allows for each component to have 1MHz increments (no company has done that before in terms of multipliers)

I don't think you fully understand what I'm attempting to convey...

Just because a lot of boards these days only give you half-step, doesn't mean new boards can't give you more. If Intel really does fix the base clock to 100MHz, then I can guarantee you motherboards will start offering such fine tuning of multiplier values.

The components that cannot handle overclocking are a non-issue since, with the aforementioned highly granular multiplier control, you will NEVER touch the 100MHz FSB clockspeed. The only thing you'll ever need to adjust are Core multiplier, HT Multiplier, Memory Divider, PCIe Multiplier, and Northbridge Multiplier.

Let me make that very clear. The FSB does not need to change from 100MHz if multiplier control is granular enough.

Lets assume you had such a motherboard, where all multipliers and dividers can be controlled down to the nearest tenth (20.1x, 20.2x, 20.3x, etc). This means that all clockspeeds within the system can be controlled in 10MHz steps, which gives you control down to a hundredth of a gigahertz (2.01GHz, 2.02GHz, 2.03GHz, etc). That's perfectly fine, and you don't have to touch the FSB at all (which would overclock everything instead of just the components you want).

1MHz increments are pointlessly small. Do you really need control down to a thousandth (0.001) of a gigahertz?