Last week, an unconfirmed Internet report claimed that Intel was going to show off how end users can overclock their SSDs for the first time during next week's IDF conference. As it turns out, the SSD overclocking story is true, but Intel decided to jump the gun a bit and offered PAX Prime attendees in Seattle a chance to see this new method in action ahead of IDF.
As reported by Legit Reviews, the demo showed that Intel is adding the SSD overclocking feature to its already released Extreme Tuning Utility tool. The software will be able to overclock two aspects of an Intel SSD. One is the controller clock speed and the other is the speed of the NAND Flash chips inside.
On the SSD that Intel used in the demo (a 480 GB drive), the controller speed was increased from 400MHz to 625MHz via the Extreme Tuning Utility. The NAND Flash speeds were also boosted from 83MHz to 100MHz with the same software. Users can boost one setting or the other but the PAX Prime demo indicated that boosting both with the tool resulted in an even bigger overall performance jump. The article states:
The sequential read increased to 493.38MB/s from the default of 474.27MB/s, a jump of 4%. The sequential write speed saw a much better gain jumping to 431.32MB/s from 400.82MB/s, a gain of nearly 8%. The overall AS SSD score went from 918 to 1066, which is a performance gain of 16.1%.
Intel indicated during the PAX Prime demo that it would charge more for its SSDs that can be overclocked but details were not revealed. More information about the SSD overclocking will still be offered at the IDF conference in San Francisco on September 10th.
Source: Legit Reviews | Image via Legit Reviews
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