In news:alt.comp.hardware.amd.x86-64, Jim Beard
posted on Sun, 30 Dec 2012 11:00:08 -0500 the following:

If you decide saving money is important to you,

I wish I didn't have to worry about money. If I had more to spend, I
wouldn't care about saving it. But since I only had $827 to spend on new
parts, I had to skimp on cores in case I have to get another hard drive.
And, of course, I needed the motherboard and memory, plus I had to get a
new SATA DVD drive/burner since all I have is the a couple of the old IDE
types. And then there was Windows 8, full version OEM. I had two
identical Western Digital 320GB SATA hard drives, but one went bad within
two years. I'm still using the other one. In the rig I'm replacing, I
was running only that one drive with two partitions. Now that I'm going
to try to run Win8 64-bit and WinXP 32-bit on different partitions, I
might need a second drive, and I'm going to try a solid-state drive if I
actually need to get one. Perhaps I can get a 120GB SSD and give 80GB to
Windows 8 and 40GB to Windows XP, since hopefully all I'll have on WinXP
is Final Fantasy XI. Then I'll have the full 320GB drive for data. But
then, I also need to replace my video capture board. I can do that for
$42. And it would be nice to have front-panel USB ports with a MicroSD
card-reader. I had very little luck finding a front-panel unit that has
card readers and more than one USB port. Most had one USB port. One had
three, but the reviews were horrible, and one reviewer said that his
MicroSD card went into the slot so far that you'd definitely need
fingernails to get it out. My friend's PC has a MicroSD reader and the
card still sticks out about 5/8 of an inch when it's recognized by his
computer.

you can buy a cpu that has 4 or 6 cores that passed QA tests, and one
or more that did not. The ones that did not have been disabled, and
do nothing more than take up room on the chip.

I just assumed, incorrectly, apparently, that a six-core chip had six
cores and they all passed with flying colors.

[...]
Why scrap a cpu with less than 8 cores that passed but that
likely will provide good service for its entire design
service-life? Why not sell it at a discount, and let both
manufacturer and buyer benefit (the manufacturer gets something
though not full price, and the buyer gets a good chip that will
be replaced if it goes bad -- cheap).

Yes, that would be nice. I'll save my receipts, as usual.

Damaeus