Article Date: 26th June 2002 Written By: Clinton "SileNceR" Warburton

The Response

AMD's response John Robinson, Country Manager, AMD Aust. and New Zealand has now responded (12:15am, 27th June), with the following:

"The prime purpose of the boxed product, which comes with the fan, assembly instruction and CPU case sticker, is to bring a convenient retail package together for no premium price other than the cost of the actual cooling fan itself.

It is important to note that the cooling fan is matched to the CPU performance rating and therefore eliminates any possibility of mismatch. The fan is serialized which is also aligned with the serial number on the CPU.

With all this, the added bonus is that AMD offer a 3-year warranty on this retail product whereas the tray product (OEM type) comes with a 1-year warranty.

The focus in Australia and New Zealand is that AMD ship all CPU’s in retail package. In reality, this focus will apply to our current and higher-end Athlon XP and Duron CPU’s. Today, that includes Athlon XP1800+ and above, as well as Duron 1.3G and above.

We will ship lower-end product in bulk though our authorized distributors as they see the market requirements. These are generally required for OEM applications exclusively, whereas both OEM’s and individual users consume the higher-end CPU’s.

Essentially it can be considered that all boxed product (retail packaging) can be associated with authorized channel import, which means that any potential claim for warranty is a very straightforward process. Whereas any higher-end product that is in tray form could pose a serious concern about how warranty cover is offered by the supplier.

It is also important to note in the case of warranty for retail CPU’s, any such return must include both the CPU and the Fan so that they can be verified as a matching pair and that no indication of overclocking of the CPU is evident.

The strong recommendation by AMD is to purchase retail package."

Our thoughts on AMD's response AMD's response confirms our thoughts on warranty reasons, including warranty cover via supplier - "...serious concern about how warranty cover is offered by the supplier...", however causes some issues for those who prefer to run better and quieter cooling Heat sink and Fan combos on their processors as this may be misconstrued as an "overclocking" action and may void your warranty - not good if all you are aiming for is a quiet processor with a longer life. It would be great to see AMD offer a series of retail processor without the heatsink bundled, as this would allow greater consumer choice as to their heatsink without causing them to pay an extra $15 for what may only be used as a paperweight.

This response does not however, actually state for certain wether or not the "tray" or OEM CPU's will still be available in the future, however I will be contacting John to find this out for sure.