How to deal with the AMD Phenomenon

31 Jan 2008 | 13:55 GMT

By The Letterman

Subject: Phenomed

Hi,

In November last year I bought a Phenom 9500.

I waited until a good motherboard came out before using this chip ( the MA790FX-DS5; brilliant board btw) and installed it. I use my PC for FPS Gaming mostly but leave the CPU crunching for SETI during idle times. I did not manage to have SETI run for longer than 10 seconds (it runs 4 SETI units at once, 1 per core, at 100% CPU) without a total system crash and restart.

I tested all components in other PCs (except the Phenom) and swapped the CPU for an Opteron 1210 and ran that at a 1gig OC; result, no crash at all.

After contacting AMD and going through all the suggested tests (Prime95 etc), they suggested I might be suffering from the now infamous Erratum.

On hearing this I asked if a refund was possible, they replied that if I read the "small print" in the guarantee, they were not liable for this as errata occur and can't be helped.

I contacted the Trading Standards and they informed me that

A: AMD have tried to enter me into an unfair contract, and B: they knowingly sold goods that were faulty.

My contract is with Komplett.co.uk anyway who I contacted about a refund.

They contacted AMD who have now backtracked and admitted a fault in the CPU to Komplett and will now have to sell the CPUs at a lesser price due to the fault (and the BIOS fix which causes up to 25% loss on CPU performance).

The result was that AMD are now selling these at a reduced price.

I have all the contact emails if you want to read them.

Yours,
Michael Chirgwin

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