&gt; they will not just have angry customers, but likely also lawsuits started against them<p>Which is why they&#x27;ve prevented over-clocking the whole time, except they haven&#x27;t.<p>Their chips that allow over-clocking and the chips that don&#x27;t are physically the same chips, there&#x27;s nothing special about them. Intel is doing this only so that you can&#x27;t buy a cheaper processor and get a more expensive processors performance.<p>I bought a 600MHz Celeron once, when the range was around 600MHz-1GHz. It overclocked stably to 900MHz. In essence I got a much faster processor for a much lower price. That is what Intel is fighting against, not some mythical lawsuit over life and limb.