Intel scraps insurance plans for CPU overclockers – and the reason might surprise you
PTPP plans simply weren’t popular…
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Intelhas announced that it’s ditching the Performance Tuning Protection Plan program, a long-running scheme whereby the chip giant provided insurance for thoseoverclocking its processors.
The plan was offeredwith the firm’s latestComet LakeCPUs at launch, but won’t be available for incomingRocket Lake(or any other) chips, as Intel says demand for bolting on overclocking protection to the warranty has waned.
Intelsaid: “As customers increasingly overclock with confidence, we are seeing lower demand for the Performance Tuning Protection Plans (PTPP). As a result, Intel will no longer offer new PTPP plans effective March 1, 2021.”
The company then clarifies: “All existing plans will continue to be honored through the duration of the processor warranty period.”
One-shot replacement
PTPP was available for ‘K’ model processors – in other words, the unlocked ones that can be overclocked – and lasted for the same length as the CPU warranty, meaning three years.
In that period, if an insured chip was pushed too hard by the user and died, Intel would issue a replacement. Although only one replacement was allowed in an effort to stop the scheme from being abused (otherwise, potentially folks could keep killing chips until they got a silicon lottery winning CPU).
All in all, this development is somewhat surprising, as it wasn’t expensive to pick up the insurance – it was $20 for a standard desktop CPU, $30 for an HEDT model – so we would have thought the scheme would’ve been more popular than Intel indicates, what with lack of demand leading to the demise of PTPP.
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At any rate, going forward there will be no overclocking insurance with Intel’s new chips. Speaking of which, Rocket Lake processors are set to land at some point this month – the latest rumor we’ve heard is thatpre-orders might kick off mid-Marchahead of an on-sale date of March 30.
ViaTom’s Hardware
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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