How to deal with the AMD Phenomenon
Letter o't'week Stuff the small print
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
Comments
Good Job!
Not only did you stick up for your rights as a consumer, you lowered the price for others. ;)So then the "fix" doesn't work?
I have the same chip, the same board, the same program (seti@home) and the same problem. I updated my BIOS and enabled the erratum "fix" and it still didn't help. So either the fix didn't acutally do anything or the problem is something else. I have been able to get it running stable by reducing the memory controller and HT link speed from 1.8 to 1.4 GHz. Someone suggested it might be a design problem that causes localized overheating in the memory controller. This theory is at least tentatively supported by my observations. Reducing from 1.8 to 1.6 GHz made seti@home last for about 10 minutes instead of 20-30 seconds before a reboot happened so a heat problem seems to be a feasible explanation. Either way, it is obvious that the Phenom was not ready for release.Unbelievable
Besides having a HUGE issue on the product, asking much more dollars than the fair price (comparing to intel), a dropping market share, a HUGE loss of money last year, a performance REALLY LOW compared to Intel, HUGE heat dissipation compared to core2 45nm. THEY STILL DO THIS KIND OF THING TO AN END COSTUMER???? They are REALLY BEGGING FOR BANKRUPT!!!wondering
does that work with all processors, I'm pretty sure they all have an errata of one type or another.I just love my Phenom 9500
I just love my Phenom 9500. No problem at all. Fast & cheap, what else do you need?Very Old News
But this is OLD NEWS from waaay back from LAST YEAR!Nothing new and all well known and completely expected. It is also openly publicised by AMD themselves.
So this is author is just on an anti-AMD trolling fest...
Next?
Gigabyte boards
Seems like the gigabyte boards don't like AMD's or Intel's lately. Unbelievable the # of forum posts on Gigabyte. I'm sure with some bios tweaks you might get around the problems but then again?????? They do seem to be working on the issue but fewer bios releases for AMD. I wouldn't say it is all AMD's fault as I have seen many issues with gigabyte and Intel also.