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AMD to focus only on retail box processors?
The Second Response
AMD's Response #2
AMD Australia and New Zealand Country Manager John Robinson has now informed us of the following:
The retail box product has been on the market for several months now and has flushed out tray(OEM) products
OEM processors are available by request only to OEM's.
To confirm with warranty support, the heatsink must be an endorsed fan as seen on the AMD website.
NO retail packages will be available that do not include the Fan/Heatsink at extra cost to the consumer.
John also tells me that more information can be found by searching at ask.amd.com.
Our Thoughts on Response #2
While the retail product has been in operation for several months, this latest development was an unexpected move to many people - I myself have been delayed for one week while my suppliers waited for stock of a Duron 1.3GHz OEM which they then found they could not recieve. The reaction from many of you is the same - it would not appear that AMD has thought to make a full press release as such to inform the IT community of these developments.
So, it would seem that our fears are not unfounded - retailers will now only sell the Retail CPU's, and anyone using a heatsink not listed here is not covered under the processor warranty; which is strange since the Alpha PAL8045 and Thermaltake Volcano 7+ are both not listed on that page - both of these could keep the average AMD processor running at under 35 degrees (Indeed the Athlon 1GHz in this system is sitting on 24 degress with an Alpha PAL8045) full load, which is very strange. It gets worse if you are in the same position as me - you have paid say $100 aroundabouts for a PAL8045 heatsink, and now you find that to be covered by warranty you have to use an inferior heatsink which may well cause instability problems in a warm system - I remember at Comdex last year when both the AMD certified HSF's couldn't keep the display machines cool causing them to both crash.
Unfortunately, this would appear to be the way AMD has turned; but I personally will continue to use MY chosen cooling method - it is our opinion that consumers should be aloud to have a choice when it comes to which heatsinks to use - otherwise AMD will expand to other things, like which motherboards you can use with their processors and leave out the performance boards.
While this may be a step by AMD to decrease invalid warranty attempts, and while it may speed up the warranty return times for the average consumer, the bigger picture is that consumer choice is again being limited to a point where we are forced to pay an extra ~$15 to get a heatsink many of us will find use for only as a heatsink (but don't throw it out; you need it for your warranty!).
A unanimous source inside AMD said that any operating temperature under 50 degrees is fine for normal use, but many of us know that a processor running at this temperature is not only prone to crashes, but heats up the rest of the componants around it, such as AGP cards, Power Supplies, and RAM. This could cause these other componants to overheat and in the process be damaged, which could be avoided by the use of a heatsink such as the Alpha PAL8045.
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