John said:
Yeah thats the thing. If you like the fan/heatsink on it already then
often the price differential isnt worth it. If you want to put your
own cooler on or have one from your old chip then any savings maybe
worth it.
True, I have got a cooler from my old chip, but it is not big enough for
the chip I am thinking of getting.
I never really cared about the chip warranty because if it works after
you get it - it tends to work for years and years. You rarely get a
defective chip. I think most chip problems are user related or else
something else is wrong with the setup.
Also very true,
Until recently my MBs and new setups were totally stable with the
usual problems that were fixable cropping up. I never had a problem
excpt twice with setups and its always something like not properly
seated chips like when you had the old celeron units with the weird
stands. And recently I set a AMD up and it wouldnt bootup. After
futzing around it did.
yes, I got a strange problem with a 1400 Athlon here, which I damaged or
thought I did, but it works in my old epox motherboard but not on my
new one. It did work on the new one once. It also do not work on my
mates motherboard. I using a Duron at the moment until next week when i
get a new chip.
I can not work this 1400 Athlon out at all.
Ive seen people who have chipped their chips, not properly install the
heatsink clip properly so that it popped up after a few minutes of use
at initial startup - and the chip was damaged and Ive read about
That what happened with the 1400, I thought the heat sink was on, and it
was working for a few days after i put it on my new Abit motherboard,
then when the cooler fell off, the computer died. From that day on, the
1400 nether worked again, apart from on the old Epox board.
people installing or having bad shims so that a gap resulted between
I was looking at the shims, but not sure if they are really worth
bothering with?
the heatsink and chip core. Lots of user related problems. Its
probably fairly rare to actually get a defective chip.
Over the years I have put many a CPU into Computers and the 1400 is the
first one that gone bang on me and that is after 2 years, if it had been
retail, I might have been able to get it replaced.
And sellers are generally hyper aware of such problems and wont take
back obviously screwed up CPUs.
There are some retailers that do not bother to look, they just refund or
replace. Ebuyer does that, they do in the U.K anyway, they may not in
the states.
I think I will see if i can send an Email to AMd and see if they have
any clues to the problem with the 1400, if they got a support email
address that is.