Intel hates Haswell overclockers

Intel is reportedly not happy with motherboard manufacturers that are opening up Haswell overclocking options for users who don’t have a Z-series Intel motherboard.

ASUS, ASRock, ECS, and even Biostar have figured out a way to allow users to adjust multiplier settings on their Haswell K-series processors even though they’re not using a Z87 motherboard.

Intel has announced that is does not condone overclocking K-series processors on non-Z chipsets and has been working on a firmware update to fix the software hack which will be applicable to its processors and chipsets. Its not known if this will be mandatory for all Haswell owners or how the update will be packaged.

Speaking to Hardware.fr, Intel said the following: “Intel plans to release a microcode update that limits processor core overclocking to Intel Z87 based platforms WW30’13.”

Intel may also be planning to seed this firmware update to manufacturers as a mandatory requirement for production. This means that it could still be possible in the future to download an older BIOS with the hack still vulnerable and simply not update Intel’s drivers from that moment on.

This comes in the wake of a period of more than three years during which Intel has severely limited overclocking of its low-end processors. Starting with Lynnfield on the LGA1156 socket, Intel limited overclocking to manual tuning via the system bus and only opened up higher speeds with the Core i7-875K, the first K-series chip.

Although one could get some extra speed out of fiddling with the system bus or BLCK, turning it too high would break system stability and affect other parts of the system like the USB ports, onboard Ethernet, and the built-in GPU on the processor.