If you enjoy overclocking the best gaming CPU, you’ll no longer be able to rely on Intel’s ‘Performance Tuning Protection Plan’ if things go wrong, as the company is discontinuing the program. The service provided a safety net by extending the warranty of processors to cover failures that came from pushing the chip too hard, but “as customers increasingly overclock with confidence”, Intel has seen a decline in demand for the subscription.
Overclocking used to be a risky undertaking, but with fail-safes built into the latest and best gaming motherboards, horror stories of CPUs dying after overclocking are far and few between. This has rendered Intel’s service pretty outdated for mild overclocking, especially considering the $20-$30 monthly cost. Plus, if you follow our guide on how to overclock your CPU, you shouldn’t run into any problems anyway.
Some of the more hardcore overclockers will be sad to see the service go – when pushing silicon right to its limit with liquid nitrogen rather than the best AIO cooler, the stakes of something going wrong are high. The protection plan no doubt saved many the trouble of splashing hundreds on a replacement CPU.
If you are looking to overclock Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake-S chips, the company warns that any deviation from the stock clocks could void your warranty now that the protection plan is gone.
This puts Intel on par with AMD, which has never offered a protection plan of its own. Instead, the red team’s warranty is very clear that it doesn’t cover overclocking, even if you use its own Ryzen Master overclocking utility.