Silicon Lottery is a boutique online store offering prebinned Intel and AMD CPUs that have been tested to reach guaranteed clock speeds when overclocked. The store has been operating for seven years but have recently announced that they will be ceasing operation on October 31st. This news comes as the culmination of multiple factors that have been impacting the store including a shift from Intel to prebin their K-series processors reducing their overclocking potential. This maximization of existing silicon also meant that there was limited opportunity for the store to find enough faster processors to sell. The final influence was the move by Intel to switch from thermal compound under the IHS to solder Tim with their 9th generation CPUs which severely limits the thermal advantages gained from delidding. The general component shortages and delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have also impacted the business, the complete statement from Silicon Lottery can be found below.

The Intel Core i5-10600K is currently retailing for $289.99 and $299.99 respectively on Amazon and Newegg which is well above Intel's suggested MSRP of just $262. This has created a bizarre situation where it is currently better value to purchase the CPU from Silicon Lottery where it has been verified to overclock to a set amount. Silicon Lottery sells multiple binned variants of the chip ranging from 4.7 GHz - 5.1 GHz max all-core overclock with prices starting at $289.99 going all the way up to $419.99. The $299.99 option which is guaranteed to overclock to 4.9 GHz on all 6 cores, and 5.0 GHz on up to 2 cores is arguably the best value option for the chip currently.

This guaranteed all-core overclock of 4.9 GHz provides a significant performance boost over the stock base frequency of 4.1 GHz, which equates to roughly 1% - 3% gaming performance boost which while not massive still equates to a few extra FPS. If considering one of these CPUs keep in mind the need for reasonable aftermarket cooling to ensure these chips stay cool such as the Noctua NH-U12S we used in our review.

If you're one to pay more bucks for the same silicon in a bid to decrease risk of having a lower-performing overclocker than is possible with the latest AMD and Intel chips, this post is for you. Silicon Lottery has announced (absolutely expected) plans to bin AMD and Intel's latest high-performance processors starting this November.

AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X and Intel's Core i9 9900KS will be up for grabs in the website with guaranteed maximum clocks for you to peruse and then seat in your motherboard of choice. Just wait a little while longer for them to become available, since AMD's own Ryzen 9 3950X isn't yet available in the retail channel. Intel's own Core i9 9900KS has just been announced though, with availability just two days from now, on October 30th. So if you want to skip the hassle (or fun, as you see it) of finding just the right settings for your CPU of choice, keep refreshing Silicon Lottery's page. Availability is expected to be extremely limited on either part.

Users that don't want to play the silicon lottery game have been using services that offer pre-binned and pre-overclocked chips for a while now. Silicon Lottery is one of the most well known players in this game, but German retailer Caseking is now offering the same for AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 processors. AMD's work on automatic overclocking and boost clocks for their Ryzen chips has rendered manual overclocking almost (read: almost) obsolete, and in some cases it may even be detrimental to the CPU's performance to set a manual overclock that overrides AMD's boost clock algorithm. This is because AMD's boost increases speed on a single core, with subsequent cores being clocked slightly lower according to their capabilities. In effect, this means that manually overclocking all cores to, say, 4.0 GHz can sometimes render lower performance in particular tasks, since the all-core overclock is, by necessity, handicapped by the least-overclockable core.

Caseking's offerings have been pre-overclocked, and are guaranteed to hit stable overclocks at the claimed frequency, thus saving users from getting a "bad" overclocker CPU from AMD. Caseking's offerings have been tested by their own King Mod team and overclocking superstar Roman "der8auer" Hartung, with Prime95 26.6 software being used to test the overclocked chips' stability with a FFT length of 1344 for at least one hour. This practice is backed by a two-year limited warranty on the CPU. Sadly, most CPUs are out of stock at the moment, so keep on checking availability, unless one of the offerings is exactly up your alley.