You are voiding your warranty most of the time while overclocking your processors, memory, and video cards. Most manufacturers are implamenting a limited lifetime warranty, while others have a one to five year limited warranty. AMD® Processors have a 3 year limited warranty on the retail box processors, where Intel’s warranty is virtually the same. With some brief reading both companies require that the heat sink/cooling solution that is provided with the processor is the one that is used for the warranty to be valid…
AMD’s warranty
This Limited Warranty shall be null and void if the AMD microprocessor which is the subject of this Limited Warranty is used with any heat sink/fan other than the one provided herewith. From AMD warranty documents.
This is a Picture of a AMD Athlon 4400+ X2 with the Intigrated heat spreader removed… Warranty VOID!
Intel’s warranty
This is a clip of Intel’s warranty document that you can find on their website..
So technically when you slap that Thermalright XP90® on that 3000+ or Pentium 4, you have voided the warranty. Video card manufacturers are getting more lenient on “unconventional” cooling solutions. The video cards of today are coming overclocked from the factory, so why should we be left with the conventional cooling solution? So we end up voiding our warranties just to get the high temperatures from that 6800gt down to reasonable levels. Well some companies are changing…
EVGA™ has revised their Lifetime warranty.
“This lifetime warranty is valid for the life of the retail product, so long as the original purchaser owns the product, based upon the following conditions:
- Lifetime Warranty is for all retail Graphics Card and Mainboard products ending in the part numbers AX, DX, or FX
- There is no physical damage to the PCB, GPU/chipset, or components
” I quoted this directly from their warranty posted on their website, but for this warranty to be effective for you, your EVGA™ product (graphics card, or Mainboard) must have been purchased on or after June22, 2005.
The warranty is rather vague and does not state anything about overclocking, or cooling solution changes. Most of the EVGA™ Graphics cards are overclocked from the factory so I don’t think that that would have an issue on the warranty portion. This warranty has also leaded me to be a new EVGA™ customer and purchase two of their 7800GT 256-P2-N516, which should be here today.
Conclusion
So basically what you end up with is a voided warrany, some cheaper hardware that will perform with the Big Dogs and the knowledge to pass on to others that will need help. The warranties are getting better toward the overclocker, but the hardware is getting more difficult to overclock. I wonder how the AMD M2™ will overclock using DDR2™? I guess we will have to wait and see…
- In part 2 you can look forward to:
- Overclocking terms
- Some key components that will make or break you overclocking rig
- Basic software that you will need to test stability, and speeds
- Basic Overclocking how to
