BIOS And Overclocking: Now There’s Your Problem
Overclocking is such a big reason that we're able to demonstrate such massive performance boosts on a limited budget. Most of the time, the gains Paul is able to procure are downright impressive. He was able to achieve impressive 10% boosts in both of the last two $500 Gaming PC configurations.
Those speed-ups don't just apply to synthetic benchmarks. He also realized them in his gaming benchmarks.
BIOS-based flexibility is where pre-configured systems fall short. The top-tier vendors selling to mainstream users don't want those folks overclocking their machines. Overclocking creates support nightmares, if not from fried components then from general system instability. It's not that those manufacturers are out to prevent anyone from getting the most from their hardware. Rather, it's all a matter of minimizing the number of frustrated phone calls to operators with limited knowledge of enthusiast-oriented features.
As a result, it's not a surprise that our canned machines give us zero flexibility. If you want to overclock, you need to build your own computer.