Rejoice; overclocking is returning to Maxwell

NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) faced heavy criticism for bricking unlocking on laptop PCs, via a driver update. The move threatened to alienate some loyal gaming customers, who had purchased laptops from various OEMs which billed overclockability of NVIDIA’s GeForce 970m and 980m GPUs (second generation Maxwell architecture mobile parts) as a selling point. Critics complained not only at NVIDIA’s decision, but at the fact that it seemingly condoned its partner OEMs’ highly visible practice, only to change its mind and kill the “feature” proclaiming it a bug.

Well, lo and behold NVIDIA has changed its tune. In a post to the GeForce Forums, it looked to assuage the increasingly rebellious crowd, promising to reverse the controversial edict. Customer care rep “PeterS” wrote:

As you know, we are constantly tuning and optimizing the performance of your GeForce PC.

We obsess over every possible optimization so that you can enjoy a perfectly stable machine that balances game, thermal, power, and acoustic performance.

Still, many of you enjoy pushing the system even further with overclocking.

Our recent driver update disabled overclocking on some GTX notebooks. We heard from many of you that you would like this feature enabled again. So, we will again be enabling overclocking in our upcoming driver release next month for those affected notebooks.

If you are eager to regain this capability right away, you can also revert back to 344.75.

As one user pointed out, PeterS is not just a volunteer forum moderator for NVIDIA’s GeForce Forums, he’s a full fledged NVIDIA employee

[source][/source]

. It is unclear whether “ManuelG” — who originally posted NVIDIA’s proclamation that laptop overclocking was “a bug” was an actual NVIDIA employee. It’s possible that the message got distorted by the time it came from this user, assuming they’re a volunteer moderator.

Read more: DailyTech – NVIDIA Bows to Outraged Overclockers, Will Restore Feature in Upcoming Driver.