OEM or not?

[JaYbIrD]

I am planning on ordering a 200/250gb hard drive tonight or tomorrow. I was wondering if its worth saving the money and going oem? Has anybody ever had problems going this route? thx

[rseven]

OEM is fine. They just don't give you the colorful box and some extra mounting gear that you probably won't use. There are no instructions or software but this is all available online. In all it makes for a good bargain.

[dicecca112]

I never buy retail just for that fact. I have tons of screws left over, and if you can't install a hard drive without direction you should be building computers. Plus the savings always helps

[mort]

Just go with OEM, with loads of parts it doesn't really matter. Sometimes it nice to get retail though, for instance a videocard that ships with some games.

[prw001]

I'll throw my 2 cents in there and agree with the rest, go with the OEM. I jsut recently built an all OEM computer and its running great.

[Th0r]

Sometimes, warrantys can be different. From like 3 year warrantys to 1 year.

[DuckDodgers]

Sometimes, warrantys can be different. From like 3 year warrantys to 1 year.

That and the retail packaging is the only difference. However I have acutally found (rarely) some OEM stuff priced higher than Retail.

[rseven]

Sometimes, warrantys can be different. From like 3 year warrantys to 1 year.
For that reason and others, CPU's are the one thing I always buy retail.

[dicecca112]

For that reason and others, CPU's are the one thing I always buy retail.


you do realize that once you change the stock cooler to aftermarket, you voided your warranty and its for that reason, I always buy OEM if I can

[rseven]

you do realize that once you change the stock cooler to aftermarket, you voided your warranty and its for that reason, I always buy OEM if I can
Generally that's true, but I believe you can change the stock cooler so long as you meet AMD's requirements for weight, size and cooling capacity. Most after market coolers do not fit these limitations but a few decent ones do. For example the SwitTech MCX64-V meets AMD's specs for the A64.

[Scott9027]

Back to the original discussion, I think you should check the warranty. If you get a longer warranty with the retail package it is probably worth paying more. Hard drives have a high rate of failure after 3 years or so, and something like Seagate's 5 year warranty would really come in handy. If the warranties are the same for OEM and retail then I would definitely recommend buying the OEM drive.

[wdeep4]

I've RMA'd more than a few hard drives in my time, and I can't recall it ever making a difference whether the drive was retail or oem. Unless you need or want all the extra stuff which comes with retail, I'd say go oem.

[unreal]

well for hd's i would go oem unless the the warrenty is different, also thier might be better deals with rebates for retail... depends on the situation..

[meionm]

Oem is the way to go

[dittohead]

i have NEVER bought a non-OEM HDD
the nearest was a cd-rw, the only extras was a audio cable, screws and a box :p

go OEM ;)