I was myself once, before switching to AMD, a user of the related trick where one could run a used $35 quad-core Xeon on e.g. a Core 2 mobo by just switching two pins on the CPU's pin grid with a little sticker. Miles better experience than the $400 Core 2 Quad.
Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#12Sounds like good* strategy by Intel. Cheap for them & the MB manufacturers to make a few little changes, all the potential issues with Old MB/New CPU systems are now "sorry, not supported", and the Rebel 0.01% can imagine that they've cleverly won a real victory - which "victory" will barely be a rounding error on any of the Big Players' financials. *"Good" by Capitalist Overlord standards
But if i can buy a new CPU for my motherboard i would be almost guaranteed to stay with Intel. Now ever upgrade is a chance to jump ship to the competition. There are probably people on their 3rd AM4 CPU with the same motherboard.
Intel only doing one upgrade per compatible mobo is kind of annoying. I had to buy and return a 6000 series CPU just to update my board's firmware so I could use the 7700k I intended to. How's the compatibility on the AMD side? Will a board work enough to upgrade itself with a newer CPU than it launched with?
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#13Reminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.
You rarely see those kinds of unlocks anymore unfortunately, since they started using eFuses to disable parts of the chip permanently. It still happens occasionally though, like the time when AMD decided to add a 4GB SKU alongside the originally planned 8GB SKU of one of their graphics cards so late in development that they didn't have time to actually change the hardware, so all of the initial batches had 8GB installed with half of it disabled in the VBIOS where applicable, which was easy to reverse by flashing the VBIOS from the 8GB version.
The one time in history when "download more RAM" wasn't just a meme.
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#14Sounds like good* strategy by Intel. Cheap for them & the MB manufacturers to make a few little changes, all the potential issues with Old MB/New CPU systems are now "sorry, not supported", and the Rebel 0.01% can imagine that they've cleverly won a real victory - which "victory" will barely be a rounding error on any of the Big Players' financials. *"Good" by Capitalist Overlord standards
It is a way to guarantee MB vendors a steady recurring revenue, thus making it a good business to build mobos for you.
AMD supports upgrades for longer, which is nice but presumably doesn't do them any favours in the OEM relationship game.
Luckily, as a customer you have a choice.
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if i can buy a new CPU for my motherboard i would be almost guaranteed to stay with Intel. Now ever upgrade is a chance to jump ship to the competition. There are probably people on their 3rd AM4 CPU with the same motherboard.
Intel only doing one upgrade per compatible mobo is kind of annoying. I had to buy and return a 6000 series CPU just to update my board's firmware so I could use the 7700k I intended to. How's the compatibility on the AMD side? Will a board work enough to upgrade itself with a newer CPU than it launched with?
I had no problems upgrading from a quad-core Zen 2 to a hexa-core Zen 3 on my particular motherboard (Gigabyte A520M H).
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if i can buy a new CPU for my motherboard i would be almost guaranteed to stay with Intel. Now ever upgrade is a chance to jump ship to the competition. There are probably people on their 3rd AM4 CPU with the same motherboard.
Intel only doing one upgrade per compatible mobo is kind of annoying. I had to buy and return a 6000 series CPU just to update my board's firmware so I could use the 7700k I intended to. How's the compatibility on the AMD side? Will a board work enough to upgrade itself with a newer CPU than it launched with?
If the board supports headless USB bios updates, yes. Those can update the bios without a cpu present.
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#17Reminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.
Taking me back to the Athlon XP Barton days
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#18Similar to how you can use a socket 771 Xeon in a socket 775 mainboard with changing a few pins and mod the bios.
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#19Reminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.
Likewise the felt marker on DVDs during the DRM Wars.
Re: Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
#20This reminds me of the olden days (1990s) when people would fill in laser cuts on hobbled CPUs with solder to boost...something. I'm old so l forget.