I was under the impression they are only guaranteed an Abit IP35 Pro or whatever its called? Could be completely wrong though.
it says " on the basis you also purchase an uprated CPU cooler and have a capable mainboard and memory such as the Abit IP35 Pro and Crucial Ballistic PC2-8500 1066MHz Memory. "
"Such as" means that you can use any board and memory that is similar does it not?.
Thats what i mean, there is too much scope to blame the end user for not getting the overclock. So you send it back and get told its fine, what happens then?
Having worked in returns for over 6 years i can just honestly see this costing them more in time and man power than they will make in extra profits. Users phoning up and moaning that they cant get it to overclock, cpus flying backwards and forwards from the customer to the returns and back and arguements over rights and wrongs. Keeping one person busy for even 15minutes on a single RMA caused by someone not being able to overlock it wipes out the small extra money they got by selling it in the first place.
Think of it this way; Mr smith buys a cpu thats sold as being able to overclock to 3ghz. He has a suitable board and ram and psu/cooler as described in the sales blurb.
He cannot however get the thing running stable at 3ghz so he phones up and complains. A member of staff has to spend time talking him through the usual stuff to make sure hes doing it all right.
This member of staff is now using his time unproductively and is therefore costing the company money all the time he isnt doing his other work.
In the end the customer is given an RMA and sends back the "faulty" product. The company is of course going to have to pay for the returns postage cost if the item is faulty. The RMA gets back and is duly tested, again costing the company money in the form of man-hours.
The cpu is then either deemed faulty, if the tester cant get it to run stable at 3ghz, or not faulty because he can.
This then leads to yet more time sorting the replacement ( and costs again to ship the new one out ) or costs more time from a member of staff who has to contact the customer and tell him its NOT faulty and deal with the ensuing arguement and so on.
All this of course is only if the user cant get the overclock stable and to their satisfaction. Lets say you will get the problem like this with 1 in 4 chips sold ( very likely when dealing with all the variables of overclocking ).
The company made an extra £15ish per chip so thats £60ish extra for 4. A single RMA will cost a couple of man hours to fully process from start to end if you include time on the phone talking to the customer and extra workload packing and shipping etc etc. If the postage back to the company and then the replacement back to the user is factored in then a 1 in 4 failure rate will negate the extra profit gained in the first place quite easily. In fact it could end up costing more if everything was factored in.
( my god ive just realised what time it is and why ive been arsed to type all this.... blame mass amounts of coffee and the fact ive been ill and been in bed for about 3 days and have a totally shot body clock!
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By selling it as a gauranteed overclockable chip you sort of make extra problem for yourself, where as a normal returned chip either works or it doesnt ( or is easy to test for stability as stock settings ) testing a chip thats sold as being able to perform above its rated spec adds in extra time for testing, as well as extra scope for arguement ( and extra time ) over the faultiness or not of the chip!.
and you can't Dr it either.
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