Good news for Intel Core Ultra 200S gamers: some major gaming PC builders say the new Boost profile won't void your warranty

An iBuyPower gaming PC being set up on a desktop. — (Image credit: Future)

Yesterday Intel announced a free performance boost for its 200S processors in the form of a Boost Overclocking Profile that you can enable in the BIOS. But while boxed processors permit enabling this without breaking warranty, Intel pointed out that warranties for PC purchases through system builders and OEMs are "provided exclusively" by those companies, not Intel.

The obvious question here is whether OEMs and system builders will honour warranties if this new Boost profile is enabled on systems bought from them. It's basically overclocking, after all.

A photo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor — (Image credit: Future)

"In the case of the Intel Core Ultra 200S overclocking profile, customers who purchased a PC from Overclockers UK featuring this CPU are free to apply the Intel provided profile, however we cannot guarantee results with the PC configuration purchased. In the event the PC subsequently develops a fault, such as overheating or incompatibility, then the customer will be covered under our warranty where we will restore their PC to the default settings."

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In other words, then, warranties in both cases will be upheld. In the latter case this will involve restoring the PC to the pre-Boost configuration if there are faults (assuming it was purchased without that configuration), but that's in-line with OCUK's warranty.

As for whether it's worth enabling the Boost profile in the first place, we can pretty confidently say 'yes'.

Our Nick has been testing it in a few games and has found that in some games it gives a decent uptick in frames. In some games, the 1% lows increase dramatically, and he even saw an increase of over 40% in 1% low frame rates in one game.

Not all games seem to have improved performance, mind, but in those that do see improvements it's worth it, even if it does mean more power consumption—it's still far less power consumption than with Intel 13th and 14th Gen chips.

Given this, it makes little sense to have it disabled. And now we know that if you've bought from iBuyPower or Overclockers UK, there's no need to worry about the warranty, either. Hopefully that'll be the case for systems bought from other OEMs and system builders, too. We've reached out to more for comment and will keep you posted if we hear back.

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Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob's led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world's #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It's definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.

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