AMD: No Grease For You!

bahamat writes "In a surprising turn of events, this article over at Xtreme Tek explains that the official stance from AMD is that you will void your warranty if you use any thermal grease or if you're not using the heatsink provided with your CPU. Sucks to be you if you buy a defective AMD CPU and put a Zalman on it for the first boot." AMD, the article says, doesn't want you to use anything "other than Shin Estu G 749."

Comments

Re:Two words...

[skroz]

Actually, they could very easily know. All they have to do is put some kind of alcohol-soluble, UV ink mark on the chip. It doesn't even have to be visible in UV... that's just if they want to be sneaky about it.

Optimized Code

[RWarrior(fobw)]

It's well known in some circles that using processor-specific optimized code causes the processor to heat up.

I have two AMD Athlon MP 2000+'s in on a Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard, and a gig of ram, in a full-tower case with four intake fans -- one on the bottom front, one on the side middle over the cards, and two in the middle back under the power supply. The exhaust fan is the PS, of course.

When running Windows 2000 on this machine, the operating temp as reported by the BIOS runs between 50c and 60c.

When I run Gentoo Linux, set up from a stage1 install and compiled specifically for the Athlon MP, the machine crashes as the temperature rises to 75c.

I'm using the retail processors that came with the fan. It's plain that they're installed correctly, but the thermal pad on the bottom (even with the adhesive backing removed properly) isn't capable of dissapating the heat.

Does this mean I'm prohibited by warranty terms from running optimized code? AMD really needs to answer this question. If they want to they could easily come up with a recommended list of approved grease, or contract with someone to sell "official grease" for situations like mine.

State law and product warranties

[Phronesis]

Why the hell do they think that they have any business messing with product warranties?

What you want to do is go to a law library and look up Vandermark v. Ford Motor Co. 61 Cal.2d 256 (1963).

Vandermark bought a new Ford in Los Angeles. Six weeks later, with 1500 miles on the odometer, the brakes failed, causing the car to wreck, seriously injuring the driver and passenger.

The Ford Dealership acknowledged that the crash was caused by defective brakes, but pointed to the warranty that read, "Dealer's obligation under this warranty is limited to replacement ... of such parts ... acknowledged by Dealer to be defective." In other words, neither the dealer nor Ford would assume responsibility for the damage to the car or the injuries to its occupants caused by the defective brakes.

One could argue that if Vandermark wanted a car with a warranty that would cover defective manufacture more comprehensibvely, he should have bought a car from a dealer that offered a better warranty, but no dealers offered warranties with significantly greater coverage. In 1964, the court ruled that the Ford dealership was strictly liable for product defects irrespective of what the warranty might say because

Retailers like manufacturers are engaged in the business of distributing goods to the public. They are an integral part of the overall producing and marketing enterprise that should bear the cost of injuries resulting from defective products.

. This followed the train of thought set in motion by Benjamin Cardozo, who wrote in 1916 in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. 138 NYS 224 (1912):

If the nature of a thing is such that it is reasonably certain to place life and limb in peril when negligently made, it is a thing of danger. . . . If to the element of danger, there is added knowledge that the thing will be used by persons other than the purchaser, and used without new tests, then irrespective of contract, the manufacturer of this thing of danger is under a duty to make it carefully.

You may argue that it is a long way from automobiles whose manufacturing defects put consumers and bystanders in danger of life and limb to a defective cooling fan on a CPU, and you would be right. But if you complain in general that the state has no business interfering with product warranties, a century of case law disagrees with you.

In closing, I will point to one of the most egregious cases in this regard. In 1937, the Massengill Company put on the market an antibiotic elixer for children composed of the drug sulfanilamide dissolved in diethylene glycol and flavoured with raspberry extract. Massengill never tested the product for safety. Diethylene glycol being a very nasty poison, 107, mostly children, died shortly thereafter from liver failure caused by this medicine. Massengill could not be sued under the laws at the time because, as the President of the company said,

My chemists and I deeply regret the fatal results, but there was no error in manufacture of the product. We have been supplying legitimate professional demand, and not once could have forseen the unlooked for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.

The nation's response to this was to pass the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which established the FDA and granted it sweeping powers to regulate the market to ensure that all food, drugs, and cosmetics were safe. Many conservative jurists, such as Richard Posner (one of Ronald Reagan's first appointments to the federal bench) promoted this expansion of tort law, noting that there is an imperfect market for information and that when information asymmetries are present, a free market does not optimally allocate resources (this observation won a Nobel prize in economics for Ackerlof, Stiglitz, and Spence). The thinking of the economics-and-law crowd was that expansion of strict liability would produce a corrective force for disclosure of information that would enhance the efficiency of markets.