With Halloween down for another year, most stores have already turned their thoughts completely to Christmas. Not that many of them did not already start, but, this is the time of year for retailers to focus on the upcoming gift-heavy holiday. Chip stock Intel (INTC) is no different here, planning a new holiday bundle to encourage purchases of its processors. Investors seemed a bit less than pleased, though, and sent shares down fractionally in Monday afternoon’s trading.
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This year’s holiday bundle, reports note, will come with your choice of one of four games. Battlefield 6 is part of the proceedings, as are Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Dying Light: The Beast, and Sid Meier’s Civilization VII. Each game retails at $69.99, except for Dying Light: The Beast, which runs $59.99.
That would be a pretty good deal in and of itself, but that is not all that Intel is offering with purchase. Buyers can also land three months of Xsplit Broadcaster service, three months of Canvid, the Black Magic Costume skin for Marvel Rivals, and a month of Magix Vegas Pro Edit 365. Oddly, the holiday bundle is only available at two retailers this year: MSI and Newegg (NEGG). This cuts a lot of potential purchase sources out of the field, including some of the largest retailers around. Most of the qualifying processors, reports note, are from the Arrow Lake lineup.
Now That’s an Overclocking
For those not familiar with the practice of “overclocking,” it is when users try to get more performance out of a processor, or a RAM chip, by running its settings at higher than those established by the factory. This can be done, but it comes with attendant risks, like overheating. But what one person did to allow for a record-setting overclocking job is perhaps more amazing than you might think.
A combination of car antifreeze and a pond pump got together to allow TrashBench, a GPU overclocker, to achieve staggering results with an Intel Arc B580 GPU. The antifreeze, a 50/50 glycol mix, had been pre-chilled in a freezer before being run through the system. The results delivered temperatures of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit—or -17 degrees Celsius—and gave 12% better performance over a stock GPU, which proved to be a world record for overclocking this particular GPU.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on two Buys, 24 Holds and six Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 77.58% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $34.81 per share implies 12.12% downside risk.
