Oem or Retail Athlon

Saruman

Apart from the colour, Is there any real difference in quality etc?
I say this because im waiting for a replacement OEM athlon 2100 XP but i have the option of getting the retail version so im wondering is there a difference.. the retail ones a brown and oem green so is the brown material better quality than the green?

Quigs Snr

No difference at all. Been using both myself (2 XP1700's one retail, one OEM) exact same. I think they just color them different to prevent OEM's being passed off as full retail (although I can't imagine why any end user would care !)

Inspector Gadget

...but wouldn't the warranties be different? Apart from that (assuming that AMD don't supply HSF's with their retail chips like Intel (at least used to) do) they're the same, I think?

Gadget

PPC

Afaik you don't get a warranty on OEM if your public.
If your a company you do.
If you buy OEM from a company you send it back to the company you bought it from.

Colour is only for the differnce of OEM and Retail i suspect as i've never seen a retail Athlon but i hear the hsf with them is crap.

donaloconnor

U also get no support?

PPC

Yeah sorry forgot to put that on the list.
Its at the top of my post

daveJAM

I've heard the retail heatsinks are great. I saw this site where they put them to the test and even with the desk fan turned up full the paper still couldn't get out from underneath them. What more do you want?

paws

we replaced a dodgy Athlon recently in work with a retail one. The HSF was _far_ quieter than before - my PC has gone from being the most irritating machine in a room full of Macs to the quietest. Even the Mac guys are impressed ;-) However the machine sucks (see my post on scan.co.uk in the retailers ratings thread).



paw

PPC

What are the temps like now though?

You can go ultra quiet for a price.

I personally don't mind aslong as its cool and not too loud.

paws

TBH I don't know. It's never something I've really considered an issue in there. The BIOS reports around 38 degrees on boot, but I've never checked whether that's on-die or just some random temp sensor on the mainboard. I gave up monitoring temps ages ago with my dual celery since it was never a problem, so I guess that just rubbed off on the Athlon *shrug* The problems might have been temp related before, but now no more random reboots etc. There's still the stuttering, and we've replaced pretty much every component in the machine to try and get rid of it (except the mboard). Anyone got any cool ways of using a dead Athlon CPU...?

Don't worry though, I'm not stupid enough to ignore temps when it comes to a new dual Athlon machine


paw