athlon fx-57 lifetime issue

[alpineranger]

I value stability more than a little extra speed and the commensurate bragging rights, so I haven't overclocked any of my processors for years. That said, I never killed a cpu even when I did overclock. I've had this processor for less than a year (and in a rig of all new parts), with the default amd heatpipe heatsink, running in an air conditioned office for the entire time, when it decides to no longer boot (nothing on screen, no beeps). Swapping out the processor for another socket 939 athlon fixes everything. Unfortunately, I was so confident of the relative longevity of my computer components that I didn't take care to keep the receipts, so AMD won't give me an RMA.

Anyways, has anyone else heard of this sort of thing happening? I was aware that the fx-57 was pretty close to it's limits (low overclockability), but I didn't think that there was that little margin for running one bone stock. Most of the time, it wasn't even under load.

 

[CTho9305]

It's all about the bathtub.

The bathtub curve, displayed in Figure 1 above, does not depict the failure rate of a single item, but describes the relative failure rate of an entire population of products over time. Some individual units will fail relatively early (infant mortality failures), others (we hope most) will last until wear-out, and some will fail during the relatively long period typically called normal life. Failures during infant mortality are highly undesirable and are always caused by defects and blunders: material defects, design blunders, errors in assembly, etc. Normal life failures are normally considered to be random cases of "stress exceeding strength."

 

[alpineranger]

I'm aware of the bathtub, but perhaps the bathtub function is significantly shifted upwards for this product. That's what I was getting at.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Bummer! Never had a problem like that, I've been lucky and never had a CPU fail on me. I've got a couple that are really old and obsolete but still work perfectly.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Newegg requires receipts for an RMA huh? Where did you buy the chip?

 

[alpineranger]

I was trying to get warranty service from AMD, not newegg. The chip was from fry's (yeah, newegg's pricing would have been better, but I needed it in a hurry).