Prophesy: The demo chips are never locked, but the retail ones are. My misunderstanding was that I thought Conroes were DDR2 1066 native.
Now, as far as OC ability, I ran across this:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=18
They achieved 4.05 GHz with a tuniq cooler, which are... huge. Even so, that's more than a 50% overclock on stock voltage. I can't wait until someone can confirm that.
In the meantime, I have a few newbie OC questions.
If the Conroe runs at a default 266 mHz bus, what DDR2 RAM would that correspond to? What DDR speed would you need to obtain the 4.05 GHz mark?
I am planning to purchase a Conroe, but not until early next year. I want to let the chipsets mature a little, and the prices are supposed to drop when the quad-cores are released.
Will I really be able to get a 4 gHZ Conroe for under $300 in January? I sure hope so.