 Fast system memory to go with your CPU has become a pretty big deal over the last couple of generations. So I was shocked to find out that Intel is limiting the memory speed on their current generation mainstream motherboard chipsets. I mean, if we were already used to this, it wouldn't even be newsworthy. But going back just one generation, even the most basic motherboard, manufacturer BIOS permitting, could run the system memory at any speed that you want, resulting in a real world performance improvement. The craziest thing about this is that the memory controller resides on the CPU, not on the motherboard anyway, making this feature differentiation entirely artificial and raising the question, is Intel just trying to upset their customers at this point? Like I would be upset if our business team didn't book sponsors like Thermal Grizzly. Thermal Grizzly's conduct-a-not liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum cooling performance for your PC. Check it out at the link in the video description. In a nutshell, if you take your shiny new Intel CPU and install it on a B or H series motherboard, a Core i7 or Core i9 will be locked to 2933 megahertz DDR4 and a Core i5 or less is forced down to 2666. And I get it, some people might feel like this is pretty minor, but problem is feelings don't matter. Performance matters until my performance sucks and it hurts my feelings. Sure enough, some applications won't care about the loss in memory speed, but for an upgrade that doesn't cost any extra in many cases, this 16 gig 3600 megahertz C18 kit was going for just 65 bucks at the time of writing, leaving up to 5% of your performance on the table in some games feels like just an entirely unnecessary self-inflicted wound. Now, of course, you can still run those CPUs at higher memory speeds if you pony up for a more expensive Z series chipset motherboard. But other than memory overclocking, what exactly is the value proposition of a Z series chipset these days? Intel includes a handful more PCI express lanes and high speed USB ports, and they allow for PCI express lane bifurcation, which can be useful for systems with multiple high performance PCI express cards. But other than that, the main selling point of Z series has traditionally been overclocking support. So the real change in Intel's position here is that overclocking now means not just running the CPU higher than factory default, but also running the memory connected to it past the officially supported speed. Now, when we asked ASUS for comment, they explained that this restriction was put in place at the BIOS level from Intel and that there's nothing that they can do to work around it. So when we call up Intel to verify and we're like, hey, yo, WTF, they confirmed that yes, non Z chipsets will only support RAM speeds slower than what has otherwise been supported since Skylake first launched five years ago. Why? Well, because the CPU is only validated for the memory speed on the tin. Therefore having fast RAM is overclocking and overclocking is a Z feature. The biggest slap in the face is that, and I actually didn't even realize this, if you care about your warranty, you might end up getting even less performance because many modules will default to speeds as low as 2133 or 2400 megahertz. And running an XMP profile technically voids your CPU warranty. Actually not technically. This is something that Intel has reportedly actually enforced in the past when customers were honest about using the feature and didn't buy their extra overclocking warranty. Here's a hot take. The overclocking warranty should be included with the overclocking motherboard and overclocking CPU, which you are already paying a premium for because otherwise Z series NK doesn't have a compelling story. Now, back when Intel was only competing against themselves, they could safely claw back features from mainstream products while simultaneously handing them back in enthusiast products for a price without fear of repercussions. But hello, Intel! That's not the world you live in today. While you're slashing capabilities, your competition is expanding them. Look at the motherboard's running AMD's value B550 chipset. They not only include overclocking support across their entire CPU product range and support for fast memory, but they also have PCI express 4.0 and bifurcation support so that you can run multi GPU. That's pretty much everything with any value to gamers that the Z series boards can do. And then some in a product that costs half as much. This whole situation honestly smacks of an executive coming along and realigning a feature set to artificially create value in one product by killing it in another. Like I cannot imagine an engineer at Intel who thought that this was a good idea or that partners were asking Intel if they could produce lower quality motherboards with crappier memory traces for some reason. And Intel, if you guys had asked anyone in the enthusiast community or heck, even those of us in the tech press, whether this was a good idea, we would have happily turned you around 180 degrees and steered you in the right direction. No consulting fee, all right? We really don't have it out for you, honest. It's just that even though the changing market realities are staring you in the face, you seem to need these kinds of wake up calls. Like, hello? You're hemorrhaging market share to a processor that realistically wouldn't even be a threat to you if you'd been tick-tocking along all this time. And yet you're still acting like a big fish. Like, to be clear, I know you're not actually doomed or anything. You've got a lot of money to throw around and you're more diversified than ever before, sure. But it's actually those things that make this kind of move feel all the more unnecessary. Like, think of your image. When people see you punching down at the consumer, rather than locking horns with the competition, don't you think that'll incentivize them to go see what all this rising fuss is about on the other side of the fence? Like, I know that a lot of you at Intel understand this, but send the others this clip. Guys, the more enthusiasts that you piss off, the more likely they're gonna recommend a competing product to family and friends, eroding mind share in a way that no marketing campaign can repair. But maybe I'm just shouting into a void. I mean, this kind of arrogant behavior is nothing new for you. Going back to the 286, 386, and 486 days, you tried to trademark numbers to keep former business partners from competing with your chips. You lost that case, and then when faster competing chips emerged, you named your next processor something that was trademarkable and regained your footing. Then along came Af1, and you started losing ground again. And like today, it all started with the enthusiasts. AMD beat you to 1 gigahertz, beat you to 64-bit, and beat you to dual core. Had it not been for Phenom's relative failure and Core 2's success, you'd have still been losing market share by the time the Core iSeries launched. And along the way, in the face of this strong competition, you've gradually chipped away at the features your fans love. First, it was making third-party CPUs incompatible with your chipsets. Then it was locking CPU core multipliers, so we couldn't overclock your value products. Then you disabled multi-CPU setups with those budget chips. You added security black boxes that ended up being the source of all those awesome security exploits that are all over the news. You created processors that deliberately left performance on the table to then sell it back to the consumer at three times the price. You limited support for your Optane SSDs to high-end chipsets, despite your memory division building a product that made the most sense in a budget build. And now we're losing high-speed memory support on value chipsets, even if we buy your fancy K-Series overclockable CPU. Have you guys been keeping up with this? Because that's a lot of stuff Intel has artificially locked down. And get this, that's not even the end of it. Error-checking memory. There's another one. It goes on and on and on. Make sure, by the way, that you guys get subscribed, because AMD happens to allow motherboard vendors to unofficially support ECC across the entire Ryzen product stack, and we're gonna take a look at that. So back to talking to Intel here. The question you guys need to ask yourselves is, do you really lose that much money by allowing enthusiasts to just do what they want with their hardware? Come on. Answer honestly. The whole point of a Xeon product is that you get validation and support. And business clients, they're gonna pay that premium no matter what hacky things your consumer platforms are capable of. AMD already proved that with Epic. So here's what you need to do. And write it down, because I'm only gonna say this once. First, listen to bean counters less and customers more. If your competition is doing something better than what you're doing or offering a feature that you don't offer because you have arbitrarily reserved it for your higher end products, that battle, already lost. Cut your losses, move on. Just turn it on. Second, failing that, listen to your engineering and technical marketing teams. These are the people with their ears to the ground who can give you the feedback you need to respond in a way that makes you look like you're on top of things and like you actually care. Got a security bug? Don't just issue a notice in PDF form on your news site. Proactively reach out to the media and provide statements, answer questions so that people who are talking about this know what your side of the story is. Get out ahead of it rather than trying to sweep it under the rug. There's a reason people are ragging on you about these security flaws. And that's because you're super unpopular. Finally, and this is a big ask, do something meaningful to fix that last problem. Show that you're actually listening. How about this? Roll back the arbitrary changes you've made to the maximum memory speed in the Comet Lake chipsets. If you do nothing else, this is something you can easily execute on right now, today, to show that you care. And then follow it up with a real apology and a commitment to do better. Because honestly, right now, your behavior is starting to smell kinda desperate. Without any kind of proper technical explanation for why this had to be done, you're just leaving me to come to my own conclusions. And you know what I think? I think you're doing this because your CPUs are running so close to the red line out of the factory that pathetically, memory overclocking, which used to be an afterthought for the K-series, actually has a better chance of meaningfully impacting system performance than CPU overclocking does. And you guys are worried that no one's gonna pay extra for K-series overclockable CPUs and Z-series overclockable chipsets for CPU overclocking because there is no overclocking. How sad is that? Finally, if you're not gonna do any of what I've asked, then I've got one final thing to offer you. Just be upfront about it. Look at Tesla. They're complete fucking assholes. They literally put heated seats in every Model 3 that they ship and then charge you $300 to enable them in software. And for whatever reason, people can't get enough of it. Oh yes, please pee on me more. So maybe that's the solution. Maybe just take a page out of that book. Just keep being brazenly anti-consumer. Just own it, you know? Send out some snarky tweets. Piss off the SEC. There, there's a winning formula for you from a literal rocket scientist. Oh, I don't even have a segue to our sponsor, but it's Squarespace. You think you don't need a website? Of course you do. You can make anything you want with Squarespace. They have award-winning templates that'll help you make your website stand out instead of looking like it's from the web 1.0 days. If you're looking to open a business online selling products, they've got you covered there too. Squarespace can help you showcase what you're selling in a modern style. They've got inventory management. There's no limit to how many items you can list on your site. And of course it's easy to use. Even we use Squarespace for our Linus Media Group and LTX Expo websites. And if you ever get stuck, they've got a 24 seven support team that's ready to help you out. So go to squarespace.com slash LTT and you can get 10% off your first purchase today. We're gonna have that linked below. If you guys are looking for another video to watch right now, how about the other side of this coin? I made one recently called Why I Still Love Intel because there are still good things there. Actually, you can also check out our review of the 10th Gen Core i9 and Core i5, which were both pleasantly surprising in terms of how they perform. Too bad they just hamstrung the mainstream motherboards that you can put them on.