Dealer sells 1000s of overclocked Celerons – with guarantees

Intel's thought police are likely to have a fit after it has emerged that a dealer in Italy is selling massively overclocked Celerons -- with his own guarantees. That emerged after a story about the electro-mechanics of overclocking written by Pete Sherriff yesterday. (Overclocking -- just say no) According to the dealer, he has sold 2,000 PCs using 300a Celerons clocked to 450MHz or more and tested in the last six months. He has provided guarantees to his customers and claims that only two pieces have been returned, and that because people tried to run the machines at over 2.6 volts. He said: "Overclocking is our customer business. Instead of buying a cpu at $300-400, they buy a cpu at us$ 100 and have better performance. If after ten months it doesn't work, they'll buy another one, and have only lost $100. He pointed out: "If you bought a Pentium III/450 in March, you saw the price decrease every two months. After ten months you have lost much more than $100 and you also have an old CPU." He is now contemplating extending his unique business model to AMD parts, he added. An Intel representative said: "Intel has a very clear position on this, we spend a lot of resources on ensuring we deliver high quality products, a key element to this is testing that a processor reliably operates at its specific frequency. By overclocking your processor you can potentially damage your processor and/or motherboard whilst also invalidating any warranty offered by Intel. "Customers need to be aware that they are sacrificing reliability for the sake of a few dollars! With the current 466Mhz Celeron Processor costing $99 and a 500Mhz Pentium III Processor costing $251, we offer excellent performance suite all budgets - and with a warranty." ®