News Trick or Treat? CPU Cherry-Picker Silicon Lottery to Close October 31st

[Admin]

Silicon Lottery, the go-to place for cherry-picked CPUs based on their overclocking potential, has announced they are closing shop, citing reduced overclocking headroom and other technological and market changes.

Trick or Treat? CPU Cherry-Picker Silicon Lottery to Close October 31st : Read more

 

[watzupken]

I actually never believed that the business is sustainable in the first place. How many people are computer enthusiasts that will want to shell out a significant premium for the absolute fastest chip they can get? The premium for top grade chip is very steep, and generally are of interest only to extreme overclockers, which makes sense for competition. In our day to day usage, that extra 100 to 200 Mhz that we can squeeze out of it is not going to make a material impact to my user experience. In addition, to squeeze out that extra Mhz, you need to maintain some cutting edge cooling solution that can keep up with the heat and power consumption.

In addition, CPU refresh cycle is quite fast. So after testing and having a bunch of CPUs, it may be hard to sell them off as it gets near to the next cycle. So I do wonder if they managed to sell off all their CPUs in the end without making a loss on any of them to begin with.

 

[vinay2070]

I actually never believed that the business is sustainable in the first place. How many people are computer enthusiasts that will want to shell out a significant premium for the absolute fastest chip they can get? The premium for top grade chip is very steep, and generally are of interest only to extreme overclockers, which makes sense for competition. In our day to day usage, that extra 100 to 200 Mhz that we can squeeze out of it is not going to make a material impact to my user experience. In addition, to squeeze out that extra Mhz, you need to maintain some cutting edge cooling solution that can keep up with the heat and power consumption.

In addition, CPU refresh cycle is quite fast. So after testing and having a bunch of CPUs, it may be hard to sell them off as it gets near to the next cycle. So I do wonder if they managed to sell off all their CPUs in the end without making a loss on any of them to begin with.

Most higher end tiers were always sold out in a few days of release. I think they did well until companies started binning it themselves. Ryzen barely had headroom to OC and intel started the same with their later series.

 

[jp7189]

While I never actually purchased anything from siliconlottery I found their statistics page to be invaluable. I often used it to help determine which processor to buy. AFAIK nowhere else is there a compilation like that.

 

[Phaaze88]

That's unfortunate.
Hopefully this helps drive home the fact that the bar for overclocking modern cpus and gpus has been set way too high for most... but it probably won't, since Silicon Lottery(company) wasn't that well known.
If you don't at least LN2 the things, you're not going to get much out of either.
The engineers took the fun out of it for most users.
Intel: already have aggressive turbo boosts out the gate. Nothing like what it used to be in the Sandy Bridge days.
AMD Ryzen: aggressive turbo boosts and boost shut off point, especially with Ryzen 5000.
Nvidia: the sneaky Gpu Boost algorithm. So many users out there are clueless on just how 'stable' their OCs really are...
AMD Radeon: I believe they have something similar to Gpu Boost. Haven't really looked into it.