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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."
You do something that could potentially damage the processor (read the article), the company is perfectly well within its legal and moral rights to void the warranty. The warranty is not insurance against malice or stupidity.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
State Law mandates a 1 year parts and manufacturing warranty irregardless of OEM status or not. Say what you will about Calif. but we do look after the consumer, except for the power consumer that is...
So what does that say? Either too many people are either applying the grease too thickly, or people are using heatsinks and OCin' their processors too much.
Basicly what it sounds like is, people are cooking their CPU's from either/or...and AMD is tired of floating the loss because of idiots.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
"Sucks to be you if you buy a defective AMD CPU and put a Zalman on it for the first boot"
AMD Athlon XP(TM) Processor Thermal Solutions
When selecting a thermal solution for your system, please refer to the following listing of heatsinks evaluated and recommended by AMD for use with AMD Athlon XP(TM) processors. Note, the following heatsinks are recommended for maintaining the specified Maximum die temperature requirement. In addition, this selection is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of all heatsinks that support AMD processors.
From the article:
"using a heatsink other than the stock heatsink on a retail chip also voids the warranty."
So if you pay the $10-15 extra for the retail instead of OEM, they expect you to use the hs/fan that comes with it.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Boycott AMD! Oh, wait, I'm already boycotting Intel for making high priced chips with high speeds that have poor performance.....CRAP!
Those who bothered to read the article would have found this little gem of a quote from Arctic Silver at the end:
Yeah, and anyone who takes their under-warranty low power, fuel efficient car and replaces the radiator with an unapproved aftermarket part, and replaces the coolant with something that doesn't meet manufacturer requirements, probably won't get warranty service, either!
uh, because with their thermal crap and the defauult fan, my proc ran over 130F. With artic silver and an aeroflow fan from vantec, my proc runs at 105F (115F under heavy load). Seems to me they are just trying to save a few bucks, afterall, the german economy has taken a hit lately. That is the problem here
YOU SUCK BALLS!
I have my folks here visiting right now from out of state. I decided to peek in and see what's cooking on Slashdot nonetheless.
Now, if I were to go in the other room and tell my folks that people were ranting and raving on a website about no being allowed to use the heat sink grease of their choice on a computer processor..... Well, regular down to earth real people just wouldn't understand.
I've installed my last three heatsinks, including my current Zalman CNPS6000AlCu, with pink TIM wax pads. TIM pads are cheap, neat, and don't require you to get crap all over your hands during application. I'll never go back to the goop game.
Since it doesn't make a difference what the hell you use to stick your heatsink onto your CPU--hell, toothpaste works just as well as AS-3--I'll stick with the easy stuff.
I am one of those people who assemble a PC, and don't touch it except to clean it out. I bought a retail AMD processor applied the HS/Fan that came with it, and have never had to take it off.
AMD only warranties RETAIL CPUs, OEM CPUs are usually warrantied by the retailer, usually if you buy a HS/Fan from them. So, if you buy OEM CPUs this doesn't apply to you. If you intend on using arctic silver / Zalman, then buy a OEM CPU (tcwo.com warrants them for a year with a HS/Fan purchase). If you want your warranty backed by AMD, buy a Retail procassor and use the included HS/Fan.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Let me explain the problem with a simple example. And this has nothing to do with those who want to overclock their CPU or otherwise soup up their system.
The fan on the "stock heatsink" they talk about is less than quiet, but more importantly is poor enough that in many cases it will not even last the life of the warranty on the CPU. And the phase change material is "one use", you can't remove the heat sink and reapply it again with the same strip of heat sink material and have it function properly. When my heat sink fan died some months after I started using it (as detected by the BIOS seeing it slowing down considerably and a reelated increase in CPU temperature), I went to the local CompUSA and got a replacement copper fan. The "stock heatsink" just isn't always available. The replacement heatsink does a far better job, but I had to use a non-conductive thermal grease to install it. By this proclimation, I would have voided my warranty in two ways, using thermal grease and a better but non-standard heat sink.
I much prefer AMD over Intel, but if AMD is going to do this they need to consider some real world situations. As far as I know they don't warranty the heatsink fan, and even if they were to start it would not be reasonable for them to expect a user to not use their computer for the time it takes to ship back a bad fan and get a replacement. If they were supplying a fan and heatsink that would never need replacement, they might be on a more moral high ground, but having a stock fan that dies easily and then claiming you void the warranty if you correctly replace the heat sink isn't user friendly. And, of course, there are some people wo have a problem with the noise the stock fan makes, and while the argument is not as strong as the one I just made, I think they should be able to replace the stock haetsink and fan with a quieter one if they want, as long as they follow good technical procedures. I certainly don't have a problem with AMD stating they will not be responsiable for problems caused by conductive thermal grease, but this policy does seem to go too far, particularly given the fan they supply on that heatsink.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Rubbing alcohol! They'll never know.
No, try again. Ever tried getting Arctic Silver (or el-cheapo white thermal paste) off a CPU with isopropanol and a Q-Tip? You won't get all of it off.
So what is the secret sauce you need to soak that Q-Tip in, you ask? Acetone. Gone without a trace every time!
If the CPU was so covered in grease, it's no wonder it ran hot. Thermal grease is meant to be used very sparingly. You want a very thin layer, just enough to fill the microscopic crevices on the CPU and heatsink mating surfaces (if the surface of the heatsink has larger-than-microscopic grooves, it's time to get out the sand paper and lap the base to a shiny finish). As good of a thermal conductor as thermal grease may be, it's terrible in comparison to a direct metal-on-metal connection. If you see a lot of grease squeeze out when you apply the heatsink, you've got too much. What you want to do is apply a thin bead of grease to one end of the CPU die, and spread it thinly across using a credit card or other device (driver's license, heavy piece of paper, etc).
If your thermal grease is applied correctly, it will come off of the CPU with little problem. A cotton swab and a dab of rubbing alcohol should be more than enough. If you have to scrub, you had too much grease to begin with.
What's the big deal? Just take the heatsink off. I did, and there haven't been any pr%L:``
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
1) using grease means you are DIY with 3rd party stuff, which means it's easier for you (or the 3rd party suff you have) to screw up and
2) using grease *improves* thermal contact, making it easier to overclock, which of course voids your warranty anyway.
Now compare the XP's "no grease" tag like to this from the AMD Athlon(TM) 64 Processor Thermal Design Guide (from page 22, secion 2.6.6):
For those that don't know, the gum-paste stuff that comes on all XP heatsinks is "phase-change material." Seems the 64 is the *exact* opposite of the XP.
I should know I've installed several dozen and got pissed at using various custom substances so a qtip dipped in wd40 along with a soft tissue dipped in likewise and one piece of toilet paper (to wipe off that nasty ass gasoline smell it leaves behind and the greasy looking stains you'd otherwise have left on it).
:)
And voila, looked like new, took a new coat of thermal paste/grease and... ran like new, all my servers still running after 2.0 years
That's my 2 cents.
JOKE: And to boot I bet it will never squeak either. Plus WD40 cuts through roughly any household thermal grease, including the vaunted Arctic Silver II stuff. The silicone paste comes off with water if anyone's worried. A moist towelette type thing will work just fine including the Staples/Radioshack anti static wipes. Hope that helps.
-Daedalus
PS - Arctic Silver 2 is good stuff, but not really much more effective than say... radioshack 1.99 tubes of thermal goo... the only rule is that you should use SOME form of evening compound to fill in gaps and uneven surface finish between cpu and heatsink... any paste will usually do, even thermal pads are better than nothing, unless that ONE degree difference from Arctic Silver II REALLY means much to you... in general all the silver compounds do is react to temperature changes more quickly... but unless you're running a superspiking cpu, you won't have an issue, and I have never had a cpu that spiked so fast and so hard that the thermal paste made a difference. Oh and to add, I've never had a CPU fail. It is all about cooling and how often you turn them on and off. Much like diesel motors...
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
btw, do NOT use acetone to clean your credit card after using it to spread the thermal paste... as I said before, acetone cuts through almost anything, including the surface of credit cards. At least mine still has a magnetic stripe.
leaving this gummy mess that won't come off with isopropyl
Isopropanol doesn't cut through grease or goo really because it is not a petroleum product. Alcohols are products of fermentation of organic material. For some reason it has become the defacto cleaner in the computer world but is really not that effective on things other than inkjet printers, and disk drives. (Sometimes keyboards). Naphtha does wonders and completely evaporates unlike WD-40 which leaves its own residue.
...AMD planted this story to use /. brainpower to think of ways to prevent violations :)
Next Intel will be posting about clock locking.
" 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."
And when they say you cleaned off your artic silver you tell them you used the alcohol to clean of the approved grease so the chip was nice and clean for them.
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
. 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):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,
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.If the ACME supercharger at a minimum meets the same engineering specs as the TRD approved unit. Then Toyota may very well be legally obliged to honour their warranty regardless of their written warranty limitation.
Consumer protection laws allow the stipulation of specifications, not brands, models or arbitary approval processes.
As always it depends on your local laws. The manufacturer must put up, or leave.