Overclocking voids your warranty? Not a chance.

[bdivi]

There has been a lot of noise about overclocking voiding the manufacturer?s warranty. I am still not sure how that practically happens. Take processors for example. You run your Celeron566 at 850MHz and one sunny day it stops. You take it to you dealer and say: ?Mr. Dealer my processor is no longer working, please, give me another one?. The point here is how the dealer and/or the manufacturer recognizes and more importantly proves that your processor burned because of overclocking or it was simply a defective part. You have similar situation with video-cards, memory or complete systems.
I personally had burned processor and memory replaced by my dealer. They could have been suspicious about what caused the defect but there was no way they would refuse my warranty call because they did not have any evidence.

Does anybody have similar experience?

Bobi

 

[Mykex]

You know they solve 20yr old murder cases with a figernail clipping and a carpet fiber......whos to say what the manufacturer can and cant tell?
For all we know any new cpu could be placed in some diagnostic socket and give a full readout of voltage speed and heat at time of death. If enough people fry chips and return them you can bet this will happen and I doubt it is very dificult to implement.

If your talking AMD chips I doubt you would be able to hide you pencil scrapes from an electron microscope. I just think there are not loosing enough money to really care anout it YET.

 

[bdivi]

Hi Mykex,

You read too much science fiction I guess. No CPU, not even the latest one, can detect let alone record voltage and speed. If Intel and AMD were able to detect the voltage or the speed of their CPUs they could easily discourage any over-clocking and this forum would not have existed. The only think the CPU can detect (Only Intel CPUs after the Deshute core) is temperature but it not logged ? a CPU is not an airplane.

Cheers,
Bobi

 

[MaJik]

I belive they have voice recorders built into them, and they can hear you say "Lets pump up the voltage more... Oh sh*t!!!" right before it stopped working

 

[Poof]

They also might be able to tell by the big scorch marks around the core...

 

[Nevin]

Should Intel decide to enforce the warranty conditions, they can use the heatsink to determine if the warranty is valid.

Boxed processors have a 1 year warranty. But only if they are used with the stock heatsink they come with. Not surprisingly, the stock heatsink and PCTC are engineered to be just enough cooling for the stock speed. To overclock successfully, you have to change the thermal compound and heatsink. But Intel CAN tell if any thermal compound or PCTC was used on the CPU other than the material on the stock heatsink. (Since thermal compound and PCTC get into the microscopic pores of the CPU case top, there is no method that can completely clean it all out.)

So Intel cannot tell that you overclocked, but they can tell that you used a cooling solution other than the stock heatsink. And that voids the warranty.

Nevin

 

[bonkers325]

nevin thats true but i got warranty on tons for cpus that u proclaimed that will void warranty

i got new cpus from intel replaced cause chips died

guess i got lucky on what over 50 cpus

 

[Technosnob]

So what your telling me is, not to send the chips back with the spray paint still over the jumpers? I used black!

 

[pm]

Intel can nearly always make a very accurate, educated guess that a CPU core has been overclocked: the typical failure mechanisms for one frequency bin are nearly always different than for another frequency bin. So, if you see a lower frequency bin fail for a failure mechanism statistically associated with a higher frequency bin, then you can make a fairly accurate educated guess as to the operating conditions.

And there should be no question of whether or not it does void your warranty. The warranty information (for a boxed Pentium II) says "Operating a processor outside of it's published specifications, such as overclocking, is not validated or supported by Intel. Doing so may result in undependable and erratic system performance, may cause data corruption, will shorten the life of the processor, and will void the Intel processor warranty.". So there can be no doubt: overclocking voids your warranty - it says so in the warranty. Phone up Intel support, tell them that you overclocked your CPU and see what they say.

But, yes, if you phone up customer support, deceive them as to the situation they will probably believe you. To me the issue is whether or not it's ethical to purposely void the manufacturers warranty and then try and hold the manufacturer to the warranty when the item has a problem. It's a question of morality, and you yourself must make the decision. There are plenty of unethical things you can do in life and not get caught.

 

[peemo]

Yep, there's an especially hot room in Hell for lying cheating overclockers.

 

[pm]

I'm not saying you shouldn't overclock - it's your CPU, you paid for it, it's yours to do with as you wish. Heck, you can use it as a frisbee if you want to. My point is that if you break it through an action that voids the warranty, then I consider it unethical to deceive the manufacturer as to the circumstances so that they will honor the warranty. And I didn't even say, "you shouldn't do this", I just said that you must make the call based on your own code of ethics.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Very well said, PM

 

[DaddyG]

I know for certain that Intel has denied claims when the stock PCTC was removed and the cpu later went defective.

If you overclock, you have the balls to take it like a man if you burn it up. Its part of being ard !!

 

[Nevin]

bonkers325-

I don't doubt that Intel has replaced all your burned up chips.

As I said in the first line of my post, "Should Intel decide to enforce the warranty conditions,"

They have not been dinging people for overclocking, but be aware, they can if they decide to do so.

Nevin

 

[pm]

<< They have not been dinging people for overclocking, but be aware, they can if they decide to do so. >>


Maybe, but it would be bad PR, IMO. I tend to believe in the &quot;customer is right&quot; system of business. If a customer says something, then I think we should believe it unless there is direct evidence to the contrary. And although Intel can guess whether or not a part was overclocked, it's a matter of statistics. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, &quot;it's better to let a guilty man go free, than hang an innocent&quot; and the if you play the statistics game, then you will definitely end up hanging some innocents.

As to whether or not Intel logs voltage and frequency: I can honestly say that I don't know. I know Intel has the capability to do this - heck the CPU comes with a PLL (Phase-locked loop) used to generate the internal clock. It's not a difficult modification to spit out the output of one stage of the PLL into a A/D converter and record the result in a register. It would be hard to get this analog circuit to track process corners, but you could definitely do it. Recording the voltage would be a equivalent challenge. I don't think Intel does this currently, but they could if they wanted to.

PS Thanks, BlueWeasel

 

[Fuboy]

If you burned out over 50 CPUs maybe you should rethink your overclocking strategy.

 

[akashra]

I don't know about the newer Intel CPUs, but I know that the SECC PIII-450 turned a green color if you ran it above spec, not sure if that is FSB or Multiplier.
A clever way, imo.

 

[shadow]

pm is my hero

 

[ndee]

Well my question is: Is it worth to look up it up with a &quot;Electron Microscope&quot; just to tell, that the CPU is overclocked? I think it's cheaper for AMD or Intel to just replace the CPUs. Just a guess.

 

[Crashedout]

Has anyone had a cpu break with out any noticble marks? I have not lost an overclocked chip yet and when if I do I assume it will be due to heat, hence schorching and very noticable marks. My guess is they cannot tell you overclocked but if you do and it screws the CPU it would probably be very noticable. So its a catch-22, right?

 

[pm]

We very rarely needed to pull out an electron microscope. That's why the job wasn't very much fun. Electron microscopy is actually a lot of fun.

Chips usually fail for similar reasons. If you run a design at a given frequency at a given voltage, then usually you will see that (for example) at Transistor A in Unit B will blow due to some design marginality. The first time you see a chip with this failure, it's a big hassle to figure it out. You get out the electron microscope, you prowl around, you figure out what the problem is. But the total number of problems is usually pretty small for a given design run in a specific condition.

Contrary to what you might think, chips almost never just &quot;die&quot; as in nothing happens when you plug them in and apply power. Usually just one or two pins are wrong. This makes it impossible to actually use it in a computer, but you can put it into a $100+ million dollar tester (from Schlumberger, Advantest, or Agilent) and the tester will tell you exactly which pins are failing when and how. This creates a &quot;pattern&quot; on the screen of the tester.

A pattern can nearly always be associated with a specific failure. So, if for example transistor A in Unit B fails, then when we do &quot;xyz&quot; to the CPU, we see that pins #1, #2 and #3 go red on the tester. Then we throw the chip away and check off that we've found another problem that relates back to this specific catagory (transistor A in Unit B).

So that's how defect binning works. It's usually very quickly done from a tester perspective. The problem is the ones that don't fall into predictable patterns. These take a long time. The overall process is also not exactly pressed for time, so the pipeline is usually pretty long (kinda like the Pentium 4). From the point that the dead part arrives until it is binned can take a fair amount of time mostly just due to the fact that the binning process uses multiple steps.

There's another thread in this forum about whether AMD does a similar process. I pretty certain that they do. In fact every major manufacturer from chips to cars to toys probably does this. You get a return, you test it to find the problem, you bin the problem into a catagory and you provide feedback to the designers as to what the problem is and what the percentage of returns that occur with the problem. Then a priority list is developed and the problem is fixing in future designs (or steppings, in this case).

I'm actually somewhat surprised that you guys seem to be under the impression that manufacturers don't do this. Do you really think major manufacturers only examine returns for exterior visible defects? Or that they just toss all the returns into the garbage? If you don't examine returns for defects how can you improve the design?

 

[TravisBickle]

&quot;There are plenty of unethical things you can do in life and not get caught&quot;.

Like claiming the PIII or P4 speed up your internet.
A year or two ago an intel bigwig had the nerve to go public saying high street stores were charging too much for PCs and damaging their own sales. Investigations were put in place and the stores were cleared. &quot;Intel is the only player with high margins in this business&quot; was the reply.
If Intel can hamstring their own perfectly good cheap chips because they are worried about some people trying to run servers at home that are TOO CHEAP- how can you have sympathy.

 

[DarkMajiq]

I agree with pm here, it's up to you whether you want to try and lie to them and get a free replacement, but remember that if you have overclocked it, your warranty IS void, so you shouldn't be pushing them for a new one if that's what happened.

 

[Viper GTS]

If you overclock, you take a risk. Just like people who take their sportscars to the racetrack. They aren't covered by their insurance anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I overclock. I've killed some damned nice hardware doing it. (Both a Voodoo3 and a GeForce2 that did 225/400 with stock cooling). But I accepted the loss as the price of playing the game. Right now I can't afford the game, so I'm not screwing with my system.

Suck it up &amp; accept your loss. You played with fire, you got burned.

Viper GTS

 

[MrDudeMan]

viper...you just gave me a whole new perspective on OCing. very good points you made there. i totally agree with you.

everyone listen to this guy..and PM too...they are pretty much telling it like it is <<You played with fire, you got burned.>>