Overclocking has changed a lot over the years, and what was once a manual process of flipping jumpers and modifying motherboards has transformed into BIOS and UEFI switches designed to automatically make the changes that we had to manually do in the past. The perception of overclocking has also changed with the advent of factory overclocking. This is different from factory “hot clocking” where a video card maker will tweak the GPU to run faster but, rather the chip maker offering an opportunistic boost in performance if certain conditions are met. This will reward those with good heatsinks and well ventilated cases by giving them free performance without needing to overclock a single megahertz.
As hardware enthusiasts we see this as the natural progression and show just how far computer hardware has come but it changes the perception on overclocking. We buy a 3.7Ghz CPU that will boost to 4.9Ghz and then can be overclocked to 5.3Ghz. If you count the base frequency that is a 1.6Ghz overclock though considering the CPU is already running at 4.9Ghz its really only a 400Mhz and not worth the hassle of that ultra high-end, TEC backed waterchiller needed to make it happen.
The same could be said for GPUs where the Boost technology will push the card to the limit of the board and then includes internal regulators to prevent people from overclocking the hardware any further. Most of these locks are economically motivated to keep RMA costs down and prevent those “guys” who always seem to break stuff from complaining that the hardware wasn’t good enough.
