You are right about the burn in I should do that soon.
If they are the same product like you said , isn't it odd that intel would back off from any warranty on these ? If it was just the packaging it really wouldn't matter for the warranty.Never raised the suspicion in you about it ?
Not at all. A
vast majority of processors sold are sold by the tray. The simple fact is that Intel doesn't want to be in the dealing-with-end-users business, and CPU failures aren't a common thing. They recognize that there's a need for retail CPU's, but even there, they push hard for you to deal with your retail vendor, not Intel directly.
For tray CPU's, vendors such as Dell, HP, and IBM handle customer problems with whatever warranty terms they want to provide to their customers, and on the back side, they negotiate their own terms with Intel for "warranty" coverage, which may bear little resemblance to what's being offered to customers.
A lot of us smaller shops may buy tray CPU's as well, because often they offer parts that aren't available as retail. The distributor we've been buying Intel parts through offers a three month warranty on Intel parts. That's long enough for them to be shipped, received, stored in inventory for a few weeks, and then put into a system and burned in. The problem is I have no leverage to get that warranty extended more than that, so there's some risk there. Maybe I don't want to provide a year warranty on a system that a customer might then decide to take apart and mess with, because if I get a warranty claim at the six month mark and I can't prove it has been tampered with, then I'm out the replacement cost on the CPU. Depends on the profit margin and the customer, of course.
But anyways, Intel gets to avoid most of the drama that the hard drive manufacturers have to accept as part of their business, because CPU failures are relatively unusual - maybe one in a thousand. Even over time, the usual cause of failure would be thermal stresses or power issues, any other failure is damn rare.
So let me see if I can summarize this in a more easily understood manner. For tray CPU's, Intel's working with manufacturers and distributors that order these things by the thousands or tens of thousands. They most likely say something like "for failures, log the FPO/ATPO, then toss the failed chips in a box in the corner, and mail them back to us every few months, and we'll credit you for them." That's very attractive because it is a low drama sort of way to just get on with life.
