For better or worse, Ars is reporting that Gateway will start selling factory-overclocked computers. They’re only overclocking the highest-end systems, and (surprisingly) they seem to be offering a full factory warranty.
Someone asked on one of the newsgroups the other day why overclocking matters. When you run a CPU out of spec, it can fail in various creative ways. There is a bucket for crashes of this type within Microsoft, and !analyze buckets obvious crashes as hardware errors as well. Raymond discusses this a bit more from Microsoft’s perspective.
As a driver guy, I am pretty opposed to this practice. It means that I’m going to wind up getting more crash dumps with difficult-to-debug problems. I put a lot of pressure on my team to not close bugs as INVALID or WORKSFORME, even if the bug is hard to repro or track down. This is obviously going to undermine that effort.
But, it was inevitable, and I’m sure Gateway will be rewarded for their innovation. 