It's not all or nothing, and factory testing is used not only for finding defects but also for finding the maximum operating speed and temperature ratings of each chip. And outright defects don't necessarily mean the chip has to be dumped because they may be sold as slower or lower capacity chips, an example being the earlier AMD Durons, which were Athlons with defective L2 caches that were partially disabled. Don't worry. Factory testing is done at higher temperatures than you'll ever use, unless your heatsink fan stops. Don't worry
Taiwan brand electrolytic capacitors are aren't nearly as good as their other products. This is why some Taiwan motherboards have Taiwan caps for bypass but Japanese caps for their switching voltage converters, and motherboards sold to Intel or Dell may have all Japanese caps.
But that's not business but art, engineering, and science. The most intensive business computing typically involves converting documents to printable form. I used to work for someone who gave the fastest, newest computers to the executives and left his engineers doing CAD work on 100 MHz 486s. Now I work for a much better person who gives the engineers everything they want, sometimes even before they ask for it, and makes the executives perform real work and get by with the slowest computers.
Wrong. It makes a lot of sense to buy a system which wont end up with a dead cpu if the cpu fan fails for whatever reason. Just replace the cpu fan and carry on regardless if that happens. Makes absolutely no sense to have to replace the cpu too if something happens to the cpu fan or say the heatsink clips give way or someone didnt install it properly. Its just another thing worth considering when deciding which particular cpu to use, like that chipset question is too. Presumably he was pissed off about having to replace the cpu. I would be too, particularly when that was one of the most expensive components in the system and it should have been designed better so that didnt happen. Irrelevant to whether its bad design for the cpu to end up dead due to something as trivial as a cpu fan failure or bad installation of the heatsink etc. Me too. No thanks, I chose to buy the cpus that were designed better instead. I still want a cpu that wont die if that stuff is neglected, because its never possible to guarantee that that stuff wont be neglected by someone who doesnt know any better. No one ever said it was. I JUST said that one advantage with an intel cpu is that you can have an intel chipset and that on the whole there have been less problems with those than there have been with VIA etc. Which is why I choose to avoid VIA chipsets when thats feasible, even when using an intel cpu. Which is another reason why I choose to use Intel chipsets unless there is a good reason not to. The problems seen with past generations of chipsets does provide some evidence of the capability of that chipset supplier. Sure, I dont normally buy the bleeding edge, and choose to avoid the chipsets which have demonstrated that the manufacturer's design capabilitys have had severe problems in the past. I do that with hard drives too. In practice few personal desktop systems have the performance determined by the cpu anyway. Or realise that hardly any users would ever be able to pick any difference any benchmark claims to see, with the main exception being with games. And bugger all personal desktop systems are used for demanding games anyway.
I had to reload the OS due to a virus infection on a C3 machine. It was running at over 800mhz, but I swear a P2 400 would have beat it in performance, no contest. Installing Adobe Acrobat 7 took FOREVER, I wanted to get out and push. The customer told me she bought it new for $400 sans OS. I think she overpaid. (I didn't tell her that ) I'm glad the VIA chip works for your situation, But I'd hate to inflict it on an unsuspecting person. Lots of businesses have database systems, or Lotus Notes, or various other intensive apps. If you're just running Word, there's no problem.
Seems more likely the heatsink was installed with the OEM thermal interface pad which "supposedly" eliminates the need for thermal grease, even though many do find grease works better.
Eh? A few here appear to be missing the point, what is I am saying that AMD typicall consume less power. You have 50 degree C ( I assume you mean chip temp, but you didn't bother to say) because you expensive cooling system is doubling as a space heater, hence you won't need much of a central heating system as you PC is doing half of the job. Your cooling system takes heat out of the chip(s) and pumps it into a room (as does a fridge by the way).
Err....if the chip is so hot that it is unstable then it is almost certaintly loweing the chips working life, OK it won't die overnight but it will reduce its overall lifespan. So you find an appropiate temp to run it at below a level which generates errors. Yea you could run at 80 degrees C without damaging the silicon in the short term, but you would get so many reboots you might as well chuck it in a furnace for what good it would be.
You have seen the adverts have you not with the 'intel inside' thing a then four musical notes dum dum-dum dum, this reprograms a humam mind and subconsiously tells it to 'buy pent-i um'. (same 'sylables'). It's called brainwashing in marketting circles :O) dum dum-dum dum
Some uses are fine with them. Car MP3 player, light duty file or webserver are all good uses, and basic office, email and websurfing (except elaborate scripts or animations) will do fine too, but it is just so easy for a typical desktop PC to be used for something more demanding too if it is a primary use system instead of special-purpose. Funny thing is, I've thinking about using a C3 platform w/CompactFlash for a very quiet, low heat and power fileserver. It will be a shame that I'm going to put hard drives in it, more than doubling the power and making system slightly audible, requiring a fan. ;-) I've half a mind to see just how low power I can make it, by underclocking, reducing voltage to the motherboard chips and CPU I'm wondering if I can lower the whole thing to under 20W (sans the drives, RAID card and Gigibit nic). It's a software raid card though, I'm suspecting I can't underclock the C3 too far before it impacts drive throughput. Seems like perviously I'd tested a similar Gigabit card and PCI controller and found a Celeron 400 was about the lowest performance level possible before the performance started degrading, but then again I don't think it'll need any particular level of floating point performance so the small L2 cache may be the main issue as impacted by a lower, underclocked memory bus speed. I'm more eager to get my hands on an AMD Geode, but for the time being the price hasn't dropped enough yet, the aforementioned C3/motherboard combo I picked up for only $35, and that it allows using a smaller PSU and less power continuously running as a server, means it's practically paid for itself already.
If the CPU fan fails it is HIGHLY unlikely that either an Intel or AMD CPU will need to be replaced. However, that being said, it CAN happen with either one. I have definitely seen both AMD Athlon and Intel P4 chips fried from being run with a dead CPU fan. Usually this requires the user to continue using the system for some time though after the CPU fan stopped work, despite the fact that the computer would lock up every few minutes. If the heatsink clips give way you usually end up with one of two situations, either your system won't boot at all because it will detect that there is no CPU fan connected or your CPU will remain stuck to the bottom of the heatsink when it gives way and the pins will be damaged. Either way it doesn't make much difference if this is an AMD or Intel CPU. The real key is the second point you mentioned, what happens when someone screws up while installing their heatsink. This is the one situation where Intel's method of thermal protection tended to have an edge over AMD's. The vast majority of cases I've encountered where someone fried their AMD chip can be directly traced back to an improperly installed heatsink. A fairly minor one in my experience, unless you are not comfortable with installing your own heatsink. Intel had a better heatsink retention mechanism anyway which was more important in my experience. Fortunately though, all of these issues are in the semi-distant past now. With the Athlon64 AMD has a new and better heatsink retention mechanism, they have the same sort of thermal throttling and shutdown as a P4 and the nVidia and ATI chipsets for these processors seem very up to par. Better not buy either AMD or Intel in that case, if you screw around with the cooling mechanism enough either one will die on you. Cooling systems are not something to just ignore when they fail hoping that some short-term solution will save you. The real key idea behind thermal throttling in Intel's P4 chips was that a system administrator with an always-on server could get a warning about a failed fan and go replaced within the next few minutes BEFORE the system crashed instead of afterwards. This was definitely designed as a SHORT-term stop-gap until the problem can be fixed, not a long-term solution. As is usually the case, the CPU is just one of many pieces in the puzzle. It's performance CAN have an impact though, even for personal desktop systems. Mind you, the exact measure of "performance" is not always something that a benchmark will show you. These days I'm recommend dual-core chips to pretty much everyone looking for a desktop system, not because they'll finish a benchmark faster, but because they'll make the system much more responsive. The general rule of thumb is that most people will start to notice a difference in performance once the benchmark shows at least a 20% advantage. Before that one system may be faster, but most users will have a tough time noticing it. Obviously this is not a particularly scientific number or anything, just what many people have observed in practice.
Actually it is a sign that the person buying the system is incompetent, and the one deploying it as well. If even one moment is spent on considering the CPU's ability to shut down while there were not good fans installed (which make the risk of fan failure so remote as to be overshadowed by any other reasonable risk), the effort was made in vain. If there are good design decisions made towards cooling, the CPU shutdown mechanism is of very little usefulness, far far less than most other parameters in CPU selection. "Something happens"? If you can't keep "something" from happening, hire someone who can. This isn't rocket science. Same goes for heatsink clips and installation. Focusing on the PROBLEM prevents downtime. Ignoring the problem is what causes a perceived need for CPU shutdown features. ... about the last thing worth considering. Better than not having it, but if you need it, the person who selected the system and the builder/seller should be relieved of their duties. He should have been more pissed off about why it happened. As already written, if same thing happened in an Intel/P4 system we'd have to assume he'd be a little upset about that too. Actually no. It is ridiculous thinking about the effect of a problem rather than the source. I could complain that a pad of paper burst into flames because someone lit it on fire, but does it mean I should buy flameproof paper or avoid tools that go around lighting things on fire? yes, it's "trivial" to do it right, so if the system weren't in proper working order for long term use, the problem has already occured, is not the future result. Then you choose to promote system downtime, failures. If the system is designed properly the odds of the shutdown feature being needed are too remote to be realistically considered. If you disagree, you have never bothered to learn proper system component selection for long term use. Ok, if you presuppose a problem then that would help. I'd rather presuppose the time should be spent on eliminating the problem, or at the very least, checking for this. Ok, and again, it is pointless to name an entire company's products rather than the specific one with the issue. Someone could similarly claim "I had a p3 1.13GHz that wasn't stable, this is proof we should never buy an Intel CPU". It would be an equally invalid argument in the context of system component selection today. Ok, it's your $$. However, using them means you are necessarily less informed through actual use of any alternatives. IOW, you may then know a fair bit about them, but not be able to reasonably contrast them to anything else, _today_. Possibly true, but we are talking about CPUs... which come in different speed grades and corresponding prices. Quite commonly people will spend more for a higher CPU # than other system parameters so it is only reasonable to consider what they get for the $. That's just it, the main difference is not just games. As already written, you have to consider the app actually used, not just the newest benchmarks of the newest apps. Likely anything else, software evolves too, particularly for newer CPUs the performance changes. If one presumes a performance difference from a particular CPU but without having the exact app and version they have made an error, and likewise trying to draw conclusions about similar tasks but still non-identical software. Games are NOT the only place where AMD CPUs outperform "some" of Intel's, it's merely one place where their raw performance is shown, as it is in most apps not optimized for either architecture. So pick your CPU then add onto it's cost the cost for all the software you need to realize the benchmark score.
Sure, but that kills the capacity per $ and the performance. I don't really care so much about the noise as it isn't going to be sitting within earshot but having the fans means that someday I'll have to pop off the filter panel and clean or replace it. It's not much of a concern though, I already have a couple other filesevers with large filters over the entire 5-1/2" bay area and from the slow dust accumulation it looks like they could go several years inbetween filter replacement intervals.
You are overlooking that a gradual overheating situation with either AMD or Intel CPUs, has an overheat shutdown mechanism in place. Since Intels' was CPU-integral earlier, those CPUs have a marginally better protection but in practice you would have to have a rather unlikely overheat scenario- not as slow as if the fan failed, but not as fast as if the heatsink came off. If the heatsink installation was bad such that it didn't make contact, the clamp came off or whatever, the system can still fry a P4. It has been done, a P4's shutdown mechanism cannot respond fast enough to counter the rapid rise in temp from cold-off to on-without-heatsink-contact. Citing one example of an old platform with an ineffective means to power off a system with an Athlon in it is a similar situation to any other past era issues- unless you are buying that particular old tech, it is non-applicable to parts selections today.
I'm surprised that the Intel only runs "a bit faster" than the old Athlon. That doesn't speak very well of the Pentium D.
Well, silicon chips do seem to be stunningly reliable but they can and do fail or else there'd be little use for the entire semiconductor failure analysis business. Yes, and I've got numerous oldies but goodies as well. How that translates into modern processor with much higher current densities is another question, and one I don't have the answer to since the data isn't public. The issue of 'what temp?' should be, to some extent, almost automatic as the system should be designed to operate properly over the entire 'operating temperature range' with 'normal' operation usually significantly less. I don't think that necessarily holds, however, for systems employing aggressive thermal management/throttling techniques because the processor can be operated closer to the maximum limit under 'normal' ambient conditions and throttled back in the higher temperature environment.
I didn't think you were THAT concerned with performance, what with all that about underclocking a low performance chip, software RAID, and so on. I understand the cost aspect, tho'.
