Me = done with intel...

[Bires]

I broke an old 1.6 P4 a few weeks ago, so I went to fry's to pickup their 3.0GHz P4-E (prescott, boxed) they had on sale. I dropped it in, set voltages to by cpu, and ran it. It booted fine, but the BIOS kept yelling at me that the CPU type was invalid (on a Abit IS7).

Ran motherboard monitor 5: idle temp was 60C (!) where my 2.4C OCed to 3.0GHz idles at 41C. When I ran Sandra's benchmarks, it jumped to 75C in only ten seconds, and my temperature alarms went off, and the CPU thermal throttled! When I tried the stock cooler that intel put in the box, the CPU got so hot the thermal alarms turned on 5 seconds after booting and stayed on...71C idle!

I replaced my 2.4C, OCed it, and ran the usual benchmarks, and the OCed 2.4C ran cooler at full load than the 3.0GHz idles!

Maybe I got a bad one, and I knew Prescotts were hot...but 60! at idle!

So, I took it back to the stooge at Frys and he didn't seem the least bit surprised, especially since another customer had just returned another cpu for the same reason.

Looks like my next CPU/Mobo upgrade will be FX5x.

[spigidygak]

At times I'm convinced fry's knowingly accepts crappy batches of products from companies or ditributors to sell on the cheap. Everyone sees ad rushes into the store and buys it up. Following week walk in at any time of day and you'll see the line is loaded with pretty much the same on-sale item for exchange/return. This has happened to me several times, when buying a motherboard/cpu combo deal they had or ram. One time I bought an ECS/Athlon combo and when i went to go exchange it the guy in front of me was returning his third combo of the same item and two more people came in with the same combo to return. So blame intel here if you want but I like the conspiracy of fry's selling crappy old busted stuff. Just take a look at their networking products, i'll notice sometimes a lot fo the routers are 1 or 2 generations older than what other retailers will be selling.

Don't get me wrong though I still love going to fry's haha... its like eating mcdonalds... you know the food is crap but something about it keeps you coming back.

[Bires]

...going to fry's haha... its like eating mcdonalds... you know the food is crap but something about it keeps you coming back.


Well put. My initial thought was it was Fry's, but the cpu was a boxed processor, and those are doublechecked, unlike the oem rack cpus.

[spigidygak]

I oh don't care if its retail or oem. Could of been a known crappy batch of double-checked cpus :P.

[Daversinger]

yeah I could care less about fry's sales unless its free. heh yeah it's a cool store, but just doesn't seem very honest in the management department. I know markel has had a couple of quarls with their employes in the past.

[bachviet]

If Intel has any business ethic, it should send crappy CPUs to Fry's. :shrug: I never have any problem with any Fry's combo (mostly AMD).

[DarkFury]

Which version of Motherboard Monitor are you running...

I just downloaded version 5.3.7.0 and it's saying that my Prescott 3.2 E is running at 41 degrees Celsius at idle.

When you installed your new CPU, did you use the stock thermal pad and heatsink? Personally, I went with the Cu Zalman heatsink with Arctic Silver paste.

Keeps everything nice and cool. :D BTW.. my case temp at idle is 26 according the MM5.

[Daversinger]

lol wow my amd 4000 runs at 34C at the lowest fan setting.

[Bires]

Which version of Motherboard Monitor are you running...

I just downloaded version 5.3.7.0 and it's saying that my Prescott 3.2 E is running at 41 degrees Celsius at idle.

When you installed your new CPU, did you use the stock thermal pad and heatsink? Personally, I went with the Cu Zalman heatsink with Arctic Silver paste.

Keeps everything nice and cool. :D BTW.. my case temp at idle is 26 according the MM5.

v5.3.7.0

I used my Arctic Cooling Iceberg and Arctic silver 5

I have a great OCing case, with an 80mm panaflow blowing in, and a 90mm vantec stealth as an exhaust fan. Right now, my 2.4C OCed to 3.0 (250x12) is running at 45C with a case temp of 44C and it's 82F in the room right now.

[ramazank2]

Blame frys not intel.

[Kevster]

Blame frys not intel.

Nah. That is a sealed, boxed processor. I would blame Intel, not the retailer.

Sorry to hear you got one from a bad batch, Bires. I sincerely hope you have better luck with an AMD. :D

[hapoo]

last week i got their Intel 3ghz/ECS mobo combo for 150. I'm not sure if its the same chip as the one you got but mine wasn't boxed. I installed it with a zelman heatsink on the slowest setting and it hasn't really gone over 55c (usually under 50 when idle). I don't have too much cooling in the case. The power supply is an antec fanless phantom. I just have one 120mm case fan running really slow and another really slow 80mm TRYING to blow air in through the front of the case. (the front has no air intake holes)

[Showtime]

At times I'm convinced fry's knowingly accepts crappy batches of products from companies or ditributors to sell on the cheap. Everyone sees ad rushes into the store and buys it up. Following week walk in at any time of day and you'll see the line is loaded with pretty much the same on-sale item for exchange/return. This has happened to me several times, when buying a motherboard/cpu combo deal they had or ram. One time I bought an ECS/Athlon combo and when i went to go exchange it the guy in front of me was returning his third combo of the same item and two more people came in with the same combo to return. So blame intel here if you want but I like the conspiracy of fry's selling crappy old busted stuff....

Some of that is true, but almost every combo I got from them has oc'd well. 1.6a did 2.3ghz and would have done better with a better mobo. 1.8a @ 2.7ghz w/ fan on high or 2.5ghz at acceptable noise levels. The last combo, I got there, was a athlon 2500+ that runs at 3200+ speeds all day on an ecs nf3 mobo. That combo was under $80 a while ago.

The problem here is prescott... pres-hottt. Frys had a sweet deal on a 64 3500+/ecs Nf4 Mob for $200. You should have got that instead.

[Bires]

I got a celeron(classic) 2.4GHz (24x100!) and mobo for 60 clams. Should be just enough to play low-quality highdef on my HTPC.

[Merlin]

...low-quality highdef....
Isn't that a contridiction?

[Bires]

Isn't that a contridiction?

720res vs 1080res.

MS says you need a 2.4GHz comp to do 720 and a 3.0 to do 1080.

[Burzhui]

68C i'm runnig a 3.0 p4

[Bires]

Update: The celeron just cooked, with a copper cooler, while playing a DIVX video. It's in an Antec Sonata case, with plenty of air movement. This too, I have never seen.

spigidygak: you could be right about the Frys-Intel conspiracy.