indeed so, consumers with issues should be returning their products en masse. if that were happening, retailers would be giving AMD hell and/or pulling their products until they were of satisfactory quality. but the pc industry is a strange fish in that a lot of people end up happy to tinker with their product to try and get it to where it should be (out of the box) - used to be you tinkered to get extra 'oomph' to what was advertised, now you have to tinker, in some instances just to get the damn product to work! i can't think of any other consumer product like it, where it's sold as being able to do 'x' but only if the end user is prepared to some ground work in. could you imagine buying a mobile phone advertised as having a 16mp camera but only if the user tinkers with it or whatever to get it to work at that rating.......or a car, or tv? there would be uproar, rma's galore and trading standards would be getting hammered.