THE END OF 2015:
2016 HERE WE COME!
I
t’s taken long enough but it’s finally here,
issue 36 of TheOverclocker magazine.
This is the last one for 2015 and the next
one will be in 2016 after CES in January.
2015 has been both exciting and truly
peculiar in many ways. For the most part,
in hardware, gaming and overclocking
things have been good. We’ve had more
competitions, more overclockers, better
hardware and of course a host of new
motherboards, memories and graphics
cards. We can’t say we didn’t get our fill of
new products. One suspects 2016 will only
get better, with the supposed return of AMD
as a valid CPU/platform alternative, new
GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD as usual,
Broadwell-E, KabyLake and a who knows
what else. Perhaps we may even start
seeing some 3DXPoint drives as well. It is
even more exciting right now than 2015 was,
at least on paper.
That is all next year though, for this year
I have to admit that as great as it’s been,
it’s also shown that there are some issues
present within the industry that do need
to be dealt with one way or another. If
hardware manufacturers and all the others
are to continue to enjoy the boom in the DIY
computing space, then we will need more
ingenuity and less mimicry. We will need
more creative ideas that are sensitive to the
needs of the end users and not products that
are made purely because it was possible to
do so. There are many examples of this but
I’m sure many can think of at least one.
I would also like to say that, it was in 2004
I believe that we were first introduced to
Steam. The general consensus was that
the system was buggy, a nuisance, and was
far too DRM heavy amongst many other
complaints. It is now 12, going to 13 years
later and there isn’t a bigger gaming service
than Steam. What we detested, we have
now become fond of. It has ushered in a way
for gamers to even fight back against the
increasing poor release quality of Triple-A
title via refunds. It has given a voice to indie
developers and essentially proved to be a
great enabler for both consumers and
developers. In essence, the system works. It
is far from perfect and is in need of fixing,
but by and large it works. I do believe we will
see a similar change with steam boxes and
the controller that was introduced. For all
the problems that those two products face, I
know not to bet against Valve as I’ve been on
the wrong side of Valve and its projects at
just about every turn.
In overclocking related matters, especially regarding the Z170
platform and Skylake CPUs. In light of what was covered on
the last OC-TV OC show, there was/is an inherent difficulty with
overclocking the CPUs. Not something native to the design of
course, but the mere fact that it is necessary to de-lid the CPU
to be competitive. The risks involved prior to de8auer’s De-lid kit
rendered many CPUs useless and if anything discouraged potential
overclockers from taking part in extreme overclocking. This isn’t so
much of a problem for the veterans and the seasoned competitors
but is a massive problem for the novice and amateur crowd. The
ones that are ready for liquid nitrogen would instantly be met with a
high risk proposition that was previously not there. From personal
experience, I have lost three CPUs and ultimately I was better off
with just sticking to the X99 platform. If only from
a financial perspective. Obviously the new de-lid tool rectifies this
issue, but for many people including I, it is hundreds of dollars later
and I’ll not be taking part in any extreme overclocking for the
Skylake CPUs going into 2016 perhaps.
This brings me back to the point I was making earlier, as it has
taken a community member, one with immense and many
unquantifiable contributions to the overclocking landscape, to
come up with a solution. With fewer resources than any one
manufacturer, but with a commitment to helping the community
and future overclockers. This tool could be easily manufactured
in volume by any one vendor, yet it was not. Again, speaking to
the lack of foresight and ingenuity. Odd when you consider that
without the ability to de-lid CPUs successfully,
it renders virtually all motherboards the same as the limits to
frequency scaling are capped at roughly 5.7GHz. Such, an
addition to any motherboard package would allow the
differences between motherboards to manifest themselves in
a real way. It is only then, there can be justification for that
$500 motherboard or what have you. Binning is still part of the
competitive extreme overclocking game, but taking away this
additional step does in many ways help level the playing field again
by removing unnecessary risk .
With that said, we will be ba