If you guys remember awhile back I posted that I broke my p4 2.4A . I contacted them to get it RMA'd but didn't do it cause I went to Gary "the chip guy" to fix it. He couldn't do it. So 2 months later, I called Intel AGAIN and got another RMA form no questions asked. Shipped it the next day and got a brand new Chip in less than a week. I did add a very nice letter saying how I appreciated their time but hey that couldn't helped much .

So in the end, Intel will be A-OK in my books!!!!

I guess this is geared to those that think Intels warranty program is shady. hahaha.

I never heard anyone say anything bad about Intel's warranty. The actual material cost of a chip is rather low. Most of the cost is R&D, fixed manufacturing costs for the plant and chip making equipement, and (of course) marketing.

I have, they're offloading it onto motherboard manufacturers by making the pins part of the socket instead of part of the CPU.

I forgot to mention that the chip was a physical damage. several of the pins broke off. As intel states in their waranty info., No physical damage to the processor is covered under the warranty . I guess they're not too strict about it. I even told them that there was "physical damage." It wasn't like i was trying to hide it either. Well, I still got it!

I don't think that is a poor reflection of Intel's warranty.

If any pins broke off, that is physical damage inflicted by the user, or perhaps the motherboard manufacturer if the socket was defective (not likely). The only exception would be if there was defect in the pins themselves that caused them to break too easily, but that is fairly unlikely.

What you want is insurance, not a warranty. If you purchase the product with certain credit cards, they will provide "accident" insurance with the purchase. Some will also extend the manufacturer's warranty by an extra year.

Maybe it was a chip that is out of production and they still have some stock laying around. If not, you were very fortunate.

The reversed pins are only supposed to be good for 20 insertions.

The chip may have been out of production but I recently went to fry's and they're still offering the chip with certain combos and the chip alone at regular price. You can tell when a company is discontinuing a product when Fry's sells the item with a red tag. But yeah, I was "very fortunate." I think the nice letter helped

Typically motherboards are cheaper than processors, so I don't see a problem with the reversed pins.

And yea, the material cost of a single chip is low, but their production methods are insanely expensive. For a brand new CPU model, only about 10% of those produced do not fail QC testing. This number gradually rises to roughly 50%, but by then the model is being phased out. It's rough, but CPU manufacturing is highly competitive, and they do what they can to stay ahead of the game, even if it means inflating the cost of their processors. AMD and Intel both do this.

one big problem with that conspiracy theory is that... well, who makes more pentium mbs than anyone else? right, intel does the new contacts are actually fairly similar to what most motherboards already used; all that basically happened was the pins were removed from the CPU, and the plastic grid overlay was removed from the CPU socket. just removes a couple points of failure when the contacts are now like 1mm apart.

and previous motherboards weren't intended to handle too many more insertions either. how many times will any non-reviewer remove their CPU? once, maybe two or three times max if their CPU comes out along with the heatsink... though i don't think that happens with socket 775 anyways, but been too long since they were introduced for me to remember.

if initial yields were that low for everyone and nothing could be done, AMD would no longer be in business - their profit margins are razor thin compared to Intel's, pretty amazing how well they've done selling far less CPUs at 10-20% of Intel's profit per cpu.