OEM vs. Retail

[Zombie]

I hate to have to show my ignorance (ha, like that's hard), but I'm looking around for a P3 700 to O/C, and the OEM prices are about $50 more than retail. Why is this? Are you basically just paying extra for the warranty? That would be my guess.
Also, most of my recent probelms while overclocking my Celery 566 seem to be video related. I can run stable in windows at 905 w/106 FSB, but I get kicked back to my desktop not too long into the Q3 test. Is my voodoo3 2000 pci creating a bottleneck? Should I go with one of the newer bigger cards (64 meg ddr) and go AGP this time, or would I just be wasting my money? PS- Im not worrying about graphics here, just O/Cing stability.

[Tachyon]

You should be paying less for OEM than retail. Woth OEM you get a 30 day Warranty from Intel and with retail you get a 1 year warrany plus a nifty HSF.

As far as your video problem, if the video works ok at first, it might be a voltage setting problem, it may be that the video card gets too hot, or maybe it doesn't really like the frequency it's running at.

[chris]

If you look at overclocked cpu's it seems that most people opt for the retail chip. I did ! The warranty of an Intel chip is 3 years according to my certificate. I chose it over OEM not only for the warranty but because I was told you have a better chance of overclocking it. True or not I'm not too sure but my 800E cCO runs at 967 with a stock heatsink and fan @44degrees C. The OEM's might be the chips which dont overclock very well by Intel and end up rated at there near flat out speed. ???

[klosters64a]

Check prices again. Retail Boxed are only a bit more than OEM. Go RB! OEM's can have a one week to one year warranty from the retailer. Retail Boxed have a three year warranty from Intel. 'Nuff said.

Your PCI V3/2K is hogging the PCI bus's bandwidth. (The AGP versions are good at 89 Mhz AGP/133 Mhz FSB(on a 440BX board). Dunno if this is responsible for dropping you out of QIII.

Assuming that your mainboard is up for it, a GF2 MX will outperform the V3/2K. In AGP form factor, of course.