OEM products

[pcpaz]

What is OEM?????

I am looking at buying an OEM ATI All in Wonder 8500DV card, does OEM make a lot of difference. Its the same for the Pioneer 106S DVD drive.

What is OEM all about????

pcpaz

 

[Sozzled]

Hi pcpaz,

OEM is original equipment manufacturer, basically anyone that builds and sells new complete or bare bones pc`s or servers. This goes from a one man band operation right up to Dell etc.

Oem parts are the parts sold to them, they normally don`t come in a fancy retail box with all the accompanying paraphernalia as these people don`t need all that. You just get the part (graphics card, cd-rom...) any drivers/installation disks and basic cables.

Hope this helps

 

[buns]

Originally posted by pcpaz
I am looking at buying an OEM ATI All in Wonder 8500DV card, does OEM make a lot of difference. pcpaz

OEM can be misused, in the case of ATI cards it often means that the card is a 'powered by' not 'built by' ATI. Certainly this was the opinion i was given! If that is the case, there are some difference, the powered by have been known not to work with certain drivers and such likes, fortunately my powered by doesnt suffer from that.

im sure i have just confused matters, if so, just ask what to clarify and i'll tr and do so!

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[jrwood]

The old ATI drivers checked for the ATI manufacturer string on your graphics card, so if you have a 'powered by ATI' card then the drivers would not install. You could get round this by modifying the .inf file and taking our the substring for manufacturer. Since the new catalyst drivers have been released they dont check for this, quite pointless really as the ATI guys over on avsforum knew people were doing this anyway to get round the problem!.

As the previous posts have said, oem usually means without manual/driver disk/perhaps some cables (e.g. no hdd cable) and no packaging which helps to reduce the price by £10 to £20. Although on some products like ATI oem products it also means the card has a lower core clock speed and is slightly slower, although for HTPC use, this does not matter.

 

[Jeff]

The powered by cards are starting to get very different in board design, effectively the only thing they have in commen is the main chip.

 

[buns]

Originally posted by Jeff
The powered by cards are starting to get very different in board design, effectively the only thing they have in commen is the main chip.

thats a bit of a bummer really.......

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[nutcase_1uk]

OEM products often carry different warranties too, such as AMD chips OEM have 7 day warranties, and retail have 12 months or soemthing like that anyway The full warrantly is supposed to be with the computer supplier, which if youy build it yourself, is YOU.

 

[Garrett]

Originally posted by nutcase_1uk
OEM products often carry different warranties too, such as AMD chips OEM have 7 day warranties, and retail have 12 months or soemthing like that anyway The full warrantly is supposed to be with the computer supplier, which if youy build it yourself, is YOU.

I was talking to a mate last night on this point and he said the guarantee on them was up to the retailer, an extremely small amount processors are bought boxed. Also some retailers sell the processors with a cooler and fan and give a longer warranty.