PCs with Intel’s new warranty-backed ‘IPO’ overclocking feature reportedly go on sale in China with claimed 10% frame-rate uplifts but what about the rest of us?

No, Intel hasn’t gone all Gordon Gekko and got into the business of stock floatations and corporate finance. Intel Performance Optimization or IPO isn’t an Initial Public Offering of a new share, but a new warranty-backed tuning paradigm that’s designed to act as a middle ground between running CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K at stock frequencies and clocking the twangers off them manually while risking permanent damage. And it’s now available on pre-built PCs.

The catch is that IPO has only been mooted by Intel in China thus far and these first PCs are indeed being sold there and not anywhere else. According to UNIKO’s Hardware on X, “Intel IPO (Intel Performance Optimization) PC is now available on the China market with specific sellers.”

IPO hasn’t been announced for global markets, but it appears to support overclocking both CPU and memory, including everything from frequencies and timings to power limits, courtesy of a set of pre-baked profiles.

As far as we can understand it, IPO appears to deliver most of the benefits of manual overclocking without the risks or need to be well-versed in PC BIOS settings. UNIKO’s Hardware’s post on X also indicates that stability at IPO profile settings is guaranteed.

In one example of the practical impact of IPO, it’s said an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K can be run at 5.4 GHz across the P-cores, up from 5.2 GHz, while the E-core frequency steps up from 4.6 GHz to 4.9 GHz. Meanwhile, the frequency of the DDR5 memory edges up from 8,000 MT/s to 8,400 MT/s.

In some ways, however, where things get really interesting is the overclocking of other elements of the CPU. The ring bus runs slightly faster at 4 GHz versus 3.9 GHz stock, while the uncore (ie parts of the chip other than the CPU cores) increases from 2.6 GHz to 3.1 GHz. Likewise, the speed of the die-to-die interconnect between the Arrow Lake CPU’s chiplets jumps from 2.1 GHz to 3.1 GHz.

Exactly how much any individual change makes is a complicated question. But overall, the example pre-built PC highlighted by UNIKO’s Hardware comes with a claim of 10% faster in-game frame rates versus stock settings when using the IPO profile.

Whether all of this is enough to firstly close the performance gap to the likes of AMD’s hot-selling 9800X3D CPU and secondly undo the PR damage of failing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, not to mention the patchy initial performance of Arrow Lake chips, including the Core Ultra 7 265K, is quite another matter.

However, if IPO performs as advertised, it’s certainly something we’d like to see rolled out beyond China. A 10% performance boost may not be massive. But when the generational uplift from, say, an Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU to the latest RTX 5070 isn’t all that much better, 10% for free definitely isn’t to be sniffed at.