I'm an imaging engineer for one of the big 3 so I guess I'd have a bit of a different perspective.

Margin wise, we as overclockers obviously get raped as end users, but you have to look at how much product is being moved in either direction. It's all about compressed volume my good man. That goes right down to the small or hidden details like manufacturing costs being paid upfront, shipping costs, storage costs...etc. Deals are cut that no one ever hears about, palms are greased, season tickets are slipped into handshakes and greeting cards. Intel has no real relationship with the overclocker, so in essence, the amount of sway we have is microscopic.

Think about it like this; would Intel want to sell $5,000,000 worth of product to hundreds or thousands of distributors/retailers, or would they want to sell $100,000,000 worth of product to one source?

No I totally see what you are saying. I'm not saying that we make a big blip on the balance sheet if all enthusiast went purely to AMD. I'm talking about total revenue here. Where I'm saying that these manufacturers really like us is in their gross margins ;) I'm saying they use us to expand their margins, not pay the bills. Intel would still do great without us, but its nice to have primo paying customers.

So yes I understand Intel keeps the lights on with OEM sales, and yes they love to move $100,000,000 of product at a time. The question is to they make 50% percent of the profit made on a $100,000,000 OEM sale on say $20,000,000 worth of sales to the DIY market?

Overclocking could cease tomorrow, and Intel wouldn't flinch.

Agreed. I'm not saying we are THAT important. Just more important than they give us credit for. All we do is pad the margins. Like I said, every overclocker could switch to AMD and intel wouldn't sweat. That doesn't mean we aren't a very nice customer to have. ;)

for sure man. Like I said, we're guinea pigs, great set of users that can take their shit to the limit. We also find allot of problems that wouldn't be exposed so it's a double edged sword.

That and some of us buy 1000 dollar CPU's that cost the same to make as 299 dollar CPU's ;)



Lightbulb moment... I betcha there is a very good reason for no cheap 32nm i7's. Back in FSB days, intel could limit the multi enough to pretty much justify the need for more expensive CPU's. Now they tried to do the same thing with i7, but thanks to people like shamino that plan was ruined. I bet Intel never expected 250+ bclock out of the x58 chipset. I know the wolfdales changed things a little, but with the s775 quads, you had to get the unlocked chip to play the game. Now with i7, its just a matter of a Classified and a 920 to bench with 70%+ of the more expensive i7's. Remember too that it was a long time before there were unlocked i7's that would bench any higher than a juiced up 920.

Yea I get it, but still a lot of things seem aimed at us

1. Open multi (No reason to have it if not to overclock, Seems as it is aimed directly at us)
2. Why get ES chips to the overclocking community any time let alone pre release ( I am fairly certain that the average Big Box Store/OEM customer has no idea who Kinpin is)
3. Why spend money to improve the stepping of an already top selling CPU (I think almost every one of us bought a C and ended up with a DO)

Some of Intels movements seemed to be aimed at us.
Is all this just marketing to get good press ..... ?

Steppings can be explained by intel wanting to improve yields. Everything else is a great point. ;)

Guys, how many 965, 975 or 980x have sold or will sell? In the thousands, opposed to in the 10's of MILLIONS for parts like the 6600 or 8400.

Think bigger boys.

EDIT: WD do you think a product engineer from say Dell looks at what kingpin does with an engineering sample and immediately orders 100,000 units based on how well they overclock?

LOL ............ great point prolly around .000000000001% of there i7 sales I would venture to guess