fast system memory to go with your CPU has become a pretty big deal over the
last couple of generations so i was shocked to find out that Intel is
limiting the memory speed on their current generation mainstream
motherboard chipsets i mean if we were already used to this it wouldn't even be
newsworthy but going back just one generation even the most basic
motherboard manufacturer BIOS permitting could run the system memory at any speed
that you want resulting in a real world performance improvement the craziest
thing about this is that the memory controller resides on the CPU
not on the motherboard anyway making this feature differentiation entirely
artificial and raising the question is Intel just trying to upset their
customers at this point like i would be upset if our business
team didn't book sponsors like thermal grizzly thermal grizzly's conducting
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in a nutshell if you take your shiny new Intel CPU and install it on a b or h
series motherboard a core i7 or core i9 will be locked to 2933 megahertz ddr4
and a core i5 or less is forced down to
26.66 and i get it some people might
feel like this is pretty minor but problem is feelings don't matter
performance matters until my performance sucks and it hurts my feelings sure
enough some applications won't care about the loss and memory speed but for
an upgrade that doesn't cost any extra in many cases this 16 gig 3600 megahertz
c18 kit was going for just 65 bucks at the time of writing leaving up to 5
of your performance on the table in some games feels like just an entirely
unnecessary self-inflicted wound now of course you can still run those cpus at
higher memory speeds if you pony up for a more expensive z-series chipset
motherboard but other than memory overclocking what exactly is the value
proposition of a z series chipset these days Intel includes a handful more pci
express lanes and high speed usb ports and they allow for pci express lane
bifurcation which can be useful for systems with multiple high performance
pci express cards but other than that the main selling point of z series has
traditionally been overclocking support so
the real change in Intel's position here is that overclocking now means not just
running the CPU higher than factory default but also running the memory
connected to it past the officially supported speed now when we asked ASUS
for comment they explained that this restriction was put in place at the BIOS
level from Intel and that there's nothing that they can do to work around
it so when we call up Intel to verify
and we're like hey yo wtf they confirmed
that yes non-z chipsets will only support RAM
speeds slower than what has otherwise been supported since skylake first
launched five years ago why
well because the CPU is only validated for
the memory speed on the tin therefore having fast RAM is overclocking and
overclocking is a z feature
the biggest lap in the face is that i actually didn't even realize this if you
care about your warranty you might end up getting even less performance because
many modules will default to speeds as low as 2133 or
megahertz and running an xmp profile
technically voids your CPU warranty actually not technically this is
something that Intel has reportedly actually enforced in the past when
customers were honest about using the feature and didn't buy their extra
overclocking warranty here's a hot take the overclocking warranty should be
included with the overclocking motherboard and overclocking CPU which
you are already paying a premium for because otherwise z series nk
doesn't have a compelling story now
back when Intel was only competing against themselves they could safely
claw back features from mainstream products while simultaneously handing
them back in enthusiast products for a price without fear of repercussions but
hello Intel that's not the world you live in today
while you're slashing capabilities your competition is expanding them look at
the motherboards running amt's value b550 chipset they not only include
overclocking support across their entire CPU product range and support for fast
memory but they also have pci express 4.0 and bifurcation support so that you
can run multi GPU that's pretty much everything with any value to gamers that
the z series boards can do and then some
in a product that costs half as much this whole situation honestly smacks of
an executive coming along and realigning a feature set to artificially create
value in one product by killing it in another like i cannot imagine an
engineer at Intel who thought that this was a good idea or that partners were
asking Intel if they could produce lower quality motherboards with crappier
memory traces for some reason and Intel if you guys had asked anyone in the
enthusiast community or heck even those of us in the tech press whether this was
a good idea we would have happily turned you around 180 degrees and steered you
in the right direction no consulting fee right we really don't have it out for
you honest it's just that even though the changing market
realities are staring you in the face you seem to need these kinds of wake-up
calls like hello you're hemorrhaging market share to a
processor that realistically wouldn't even be a threat to you if you'd been
tick-tocking along all this time and yet you're still acting like a big fish like
to be clear i know you're not actually doomed or anything you've got a lot of
money to throw around and you're more diversified than ever before sure but
it's actually those things that make this kind of move
feel all the more unnecessary like think
of your image when people see you punching down at the consumer rather
than locking horns with the competition don't you think that'll incentivize them
to go see what all this rising fuss is about on the other side of the fence
like i know that a lot of you at Intel understand this but send the others this
clip guys the more enthusiasts that you piss off
the more likely they're going to recommend a competing product to family
and friends eroding mindshare in a way that no marketing campaign can repair
but maybe i'm just shouting into a void i mean this kind of arrogant behavior is
nothing new for you going back to the 286 386 and 486 days you tried to
trademark numbers to keep former business partners from competing with
your chips you lost that case and then when faster competing chips emerged you
named your next processor something that was trademarkable and regained your
footing then along came athlon and you started
losing ground again and like today it all started with the enthusiasts AMD
beat you to one gigahertz beat you to 64 bit and beat you to dual core had it not
been for phenom's relative failure and core 2's success you'd have still been
losing market share by the time the core i series launched and along the way
in the face of this strong competition you've gradually chipped away at the
features your fans love first it was making third-party cpus incompatible
with your chipsets then it was locking CPU core multipliers so we couldn't
overclock your value products then you disabled multi-CPU setups with those
budget chips you added security black boxes that ended up being the source of
all those awesome security exploits that are all over the news you created
processors that deliberately left performance on the table to then sell it
back to the consumer at three times the price you limited support for your
optane ssds to high-end chipsets despite
your memory division building a product that made the most sense in a budget
build and now we're losing high speed
memory support on value chipsets even if
we buy your fancy k series
overclockable CPU have you guys been keeping up with this because that's a
lot of stuff Intel has artificially locked down and get this that's not even
the end of it error checking memory there's another one it goes on and on
and on make sure by the way that you guys get subscribed because AMD happens
to allow motherboard vendors to unofficially support ecc across the
entire ryzen product stack and we're going to take a look at that so back to talking to Intel here the question you
guys need to ask yourselves is do you really lose that much money by allowing
enthusiasts to just do what they want with their hardware come on
answer honestly the whole point of a xeon product is that you get validation
and support and business clients they're going to pay that premium no matter what
hacky things your consumer platforms are capable of AMD already proved that with epic
so here's what you need to do and write it down because i'm only going
to say this once first listen to bean counters less and
customers more if your competition is doing something better than what you're
doing or offering a feature that you don't offer because you have arbitrarily
reserved it for your higher end products that battle
already lost cut your losses move on just turn it on second failing
that listen to your engineering and technical marketing teams these are the
people with their ears to the ground who can give you the feedback you need to
respond in a way that makes you look like you're on top of things and like
you actually care got a security bug don't just issue a notice in pdf form on
your news site proactively reach out to the media and provide statements answer
questions so that people who are talking about this
know what your side of the story is get out ahead of it rather than trying to
sweep it under the rug there's a reason people are ragging on you about these
security flaws and that's because you're super unpopular finally and this is a
big ask do something meaningful to fix that last
problem show that you're actually listening how about this
roll back the arbitrary changes you've made to the maximum memory speed in the
comet lake chipsets if you do nothing else this is something
you can easily execute on right now
today to show that you care
and then follow it up with a real apology and a commitment to do better
because honestly right now your behavior is
starting to smell kinda desperate without any kind of proper technical
explanation for why this had to be done you're just leaving me to come to my own
conclusions and you know what i think i think you're doing this because your
cpus are running so close to the red line out of the factory that
pathetically memory overclocking which used to be an afterthought for the
k-series actually has a better chance of
meaningfully impacting system performance than CPU overclocking does
and you guys are worried that no one's going to pay extra for k series
overclockable cpus and z series overclockable chipsets for CPU
overclocking because there is no overclocking
how sad is that finally
if you're not gonna do any of what i've asked then i've got
one final thing to offer you just be upfront about
it look at tesla they're complete [ __ ]
[ __ ] they literally put heated seats in every
model 3 that they ship and then charge you 300 to enable them in software and
for whatever reason people can't get enough of it oh yes please pee on me
more so maybe that's the solution maybe just
take a page out of that book just keep being brazenly anti-consumer just just
own it you know send out some snarky tweets
piss off the sec there there's a winning formula for you
from a literal rocket scientist
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going to have that linked below if you guys are looking for another video to watch right now how about the other side
of this coin i made one recently called why i still love Intel because there are
still good things there actually you can also check out our review of the 10th gen
core i9 and core i5 which were both pleasantly surprising in terms
of how they perform too bad they just hamstrung the mainstream
motherboards that you can put them on