Partially unlocked and fully unlocked so it looks like they are limiting OC'ing further, and fully unlocked for the extreme overclockers maybe 4.5ghz+ will cost a price premium over partially unlocked as the K series are over locked non-K chips now
Intel are really starting to piss me off with this shit, I hope AMD kick them in their nuts with avengeance
Enthusiast apparently means you need a boat load of SATA, USB, PCI-e, more cores, and quad channel ram. To my knowledge that's the only substantial difference between enthusiast and normal sandy bridge processors.
The K part is a pain, but the pricing difference has been minimized. Consider that the pricing difference during the socket 775 was well over $40 for the exact same processor unlocked (I'm looking at you Q9400). I hate the fact that they charge a premium for a feature that officially voids your warranty.
AMD is always behind in performance (at the top end), but it rarely plays the games Intel does. They have incremental socket increases (1156, 1155, 1366, and 2011 in 18 months), that make upgrading reasonable, they don't partially unlock processors, and their price point is generally more fair.
AMD does pull some crap, don't get me wrong. The partial locking of cores due to instability shows remarkable laxness in quality assurance. Triple core chips, hobbled from quad core chips, rarely (if ever) have 75% of the performance.
That being said, I'm looking to sandy bridge e for my next upgrade. 775 is a rather tired socket, and giving some ram to my 64 bit applications is something I've been itching to do. AMD doesn't play as well in those waters, but if bulldozer trounces sandybridge in multi-threaded processing they should have price, performance, and full overclocking for heavy video processing; that triple threat is something that should get Intel to release reasonably priced middle-high end processors to compete.
One can dream, can't they?
