Need Advice! Should I get OEM or retail Duron???

[brouillet]

I realize that the OEM version lacks the same gurantee and a fan/heat sink. Seems like price diff can be substantial even if you consider having to spend money on a fan for the OEM. Is there something else I should be considering? I don't plan on overclocking. Your advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Steve...

 

[pdo]

I would get a retail since a vendor could just test all the overclockable Durons and sell the ones that's not doing so well.

 

[jugornot]

Whats the vendor going to do with the the ones that are doing so well? I imagine some of the smaller internet stores might do this if they offer oc cpus for sale, but most of the higher volume stores wouldn't have time for this. Its probably luck of the draw. Actually he sounds a little timid about all this oc stuff and would probably be better off with the retail. Are you cheap enough to gamble or scared enough to pay? Actually its not a gamble on the oem because he said he wasn't going to oc. And some vendors offer extended warantees on oem chips but then again you have to pay.

 

[RoadRuner]

warranty. keep that in mind. Most retail boxed ones like from buy.com will replace if you break it during install/removal.

3 years.

worth the few extra bucks.

 

[dude]

If you aren't going to overclock, it doesn't really matter if you get an OEM or retail version of the chip. But, of course, OEM means going with the 30 or 90 warranty that the store sold you. If you go with retail, you have the freedom of returning the chip to the manufacture if something goes wrong, if there are no cosmetic defects.

If you are going to overclock, I'd advise going retail, so you don't get tested chips that don't o/c well. I used to buy all OEM chips because I worked for a computer store and whenever I wanted to get a particular chip, I just grab a tray or two of processors and test them. If I found a chip out of one try that I am satisfied with, I keep it. If not, I'll go on to the next tray. Since I can't do that now, I always go with retail chips. I never needed the warranty because from experience, I noticed that chips usually don't go bad if they worked fine in the first place.

In my 5+ years of working at the shop, I know for a fact that we had less than 5 returned Intel chips and no more than 15 returned AMD chips. And this was with our 2 year warranty we gave our customers.