• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

OEM v Retail when overclocking?

Believe me, I have.

I apologise to all except fornowagain for the petty squabbling in this thread.

Fornowagain, you are as guilty as me. Let it drop. Start your own thread if you want to insult me.

Once again I apologise for our hijacking this thread with purile crap. It ends now.
 
Believe me, I have.

I apologise to all except fornowagain for the petty squabbling in this thread.

Fornowagain, you are as guilty as me. Let it drop. Start your own thread if you want to insult me.

Once again I apologise for our hijacking this thread with purile crap. It ends now.
Click to expand...
Insulted? Certainly not my intention. I enquired if you deliberately misconstrued my comments or merely drew incorrect assumptions/conclusions from my posts. I clarified my point. And I will do so again. I know for a first hand actually having done so fact, that it is entirely possible a tray of cpus has had the lowest temperature running potentially best cpus removed. Now does this binning happen all the time? Well of course not. But I think twice on OEM especially with smaller firms and ones that offer guaranteed overclocked chips.

Do I think retail are any better? Again of course not, in fact I don't even believe in selective steppings or waver edge distance. Each and every chip (Intel at least) has its VID and thermal limits individually set at the factory and the world records (Xeons and ES aside) come from hand selected binned chips. And I don't see what the cooler has to do with it either.
 
Last edited:
Hehe! :D

Hey SlugForAButt, I think you misunderstood fornowagain's post. . . what he was saying is that if he buys a sealed retail processor then no human being has touched the chip since it left the Intel® laboratories . . .

I was reading through the thread to see what people said and I buy retail chips for the same reasons as fornowagain and some of the others.

If Intel® started releasing their OEM chips in some kind of shrink-wrap (sans HSF, Box etc) then I think you will find most of us overclockers would buy them! :)

Anyway's back onto the topic of OEM v Retail when overclocking?

I think it makes no difference as its all about good weeks, batches etc. I don't believe that Intel® differentiate between their OEM and Retail silicon although one could argue that Intel® may nudge the better chips towards the retail sector as they have a longer warranty period but having personally used Intel® products for over a decade I've yet to see one go belly up, they are almost indestructible it seems! :p

My short answer would be the OEM processor is a good choice for overclockers as long as the price difference is enough to put towards a decent cooling solution! :cool:
 
Yes, I understood what fornowagain was saying and for what its worth I believe that retail chips are of a better quality. I have no idea how many chips are made per batch at the Labs of Intel or AMD, but what I do know is that once the chips have been manufactured they are then tested and rated/branded depending on QC results.

So lets say a chip was manufactured to run at 3GHz but fails the QC test, but passes for a chip to run at 2.9GHz, that chip wont be thrown away, but rated and sold as a 2.6/2.8GHz chip. Of course I'm only guessing at the GHz numbers here, all chips will have a +/- tolerance and it makes perfect sense to me that the crème of la crème get the 3 year warranty! But there's nothing to say a OEM at the same Ghz of a retail version won't overclock just as well... The question maybe for how long, or how hot.

Anyway, that's how I see the difference with OEM vs Retail hardware and I would opted for the extra 2 years warranty for the sake of 10-30 gold nuggets.

Its an interesting point, I'd love to see some results along the lines of 100 OEM chips vs 100 Retail chips, each chip tortured with prime95 for a few weeks!

In fact, I'm off to google it now!

Turk.
 
One bad thing about buying OEM from say OCUK is that they pick though OEM chips and use chips with the lower VID's for their overclocking bundles.
 
Showboat said:
OEM comes with 1 year guarantee and no cooler, retail comes with 3 year guarantee and cooler. (think it may have been tested better). And i believe OC will void the warranty, but no idea how they could prove you oc'ed.
Click to expand...

Interesting that you believe overclocking will void the warranty Showboat. I was told by Faugusztin in another thread that OCing doesn't void the warranty except if you burn the CPU. Would like to know the definitive answer on this (if there is one!) as I bought an i5 and planned not to overclock for a year so as not to void it but might rethink that if the warranty will remain intact!
 
I got my current cpu OEM so it was cheaper without the fan and obviously much cheaper for international delivery as most of the weight is the fan (£2 delivery v £15 retail).
 
GoonerTCN said:
Interesting that you believe overclocking will void the warranty Showboat. I was told by Faugusztin in another thread that OCing doesn't void the warranty except if you burn the CPU. Would like to know the definitive answer on this (if there is one!) as I bought an i5 and planned not to overclock for a year so as not to void it but might rethink that if the warranty will remain intact!
Click to expand...

I thought oc ing did void the warranty it's just obviously very hard to prove that you've oc ed something (unless you've melted it obviously).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom