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
