No heatsink means no warranty from intel iirc.

Yeah this is what I think. OEMs have 1 year from Intel or at least it used to be that way and the Egg gives you 30 days return policy. Get it, bench it hard and return for a new one. There is no money back though from the Egg.

Any OEM chips I have bought clocked better for me than retail e8400, E8500, e8700, Q6600. With retail Ive had to keep buying chips to get a good one. Just sharing my expierience with them.

Yeah, 1 year from intel :) I've killed several OEM chips and never had any hassle getting them replaced :thumbsup:

I called Intel, and they do NOT provide any warranty on oem products. Up to the vendor or builder. I also went on chat with them, and got the same answer.

^ and Rom drops the hammer.

I think we might be referring to different things, I believe that OEM can refer to different things. One would be chips that came out of a dell/hp/etc, I know Intel provides no warranty on those. Also, chips are sold as OEM by Newegg/Frys/etc that don't included heatsinks. All I can say is that I've RMA'd several chips that I bought from fry's without a heatsink without issue. Of course I could be totally wrong :)

Could be Deux. I just didn't want any of our guys to jump on the 980x oem at the egg, then burn one up a couple of months later, only to find that the egg nor intel will warrant it....bad mojo. Perhaps intel is tightening up there policies? I just don't think that its worth the risk, especially at -186 @ 1.9v;)

Totally agree, if you're dropping $1000 on a chip may as well pay the few extra for the assurance the warranty brings :thumbsup:

You can now buy the retail cpu @ newegg WITHOUT COMBO

Just noticed they removed the combo restriction ;)