OEM - Original Equipment Manufacture

see alot of products online with either 'RETAIL' or 'OEM' price...

what are the difference between the two? looking for a DVD-Writer but the OEM prices are cheaper, whats the catch?

thanks

OEM tends to have a shorter period of manufacturer support and some don't come with cables [ depending on what the item is ].

If its a CPU, all you will get is a small box with a CPU surrounded by protective foam, not documentation or anything.

OEM also normally dosen't come with packaging, if it is a processor it won't come with heatsink or fan either. OEM versions of windows require you buy hardware with them.

an OEM DVD burner will likely be just the bare drive and no colorful retail box, no paperwork, NO SOFTWARE, no cables, and very possibly no manufactures warranty. Normally the warranty responsibilities of an OEM product falls onto the seller as they were originally produced to be sold in an assembled PC only. Some OEM product (especially software) has specific requirements in they way it can be sold which often lands them in the grey or illegal market.

Know who you are buying from before you trust them with your money!

thanks guys

pricewatch normally had deals where you could buy OEM parts, all ya had to do was pay for an OEM OS and then buy a 5 doillar piece of hardware. Other websites have done that as well.

i would prefer retail - longer warantees etc.

true, true.

Just letting the others know.

OEM cheaper, no warranties or contracts.

Retail more, as the warranties are part of it.

OEM are usually what companies call over stock, sub vender buy them in bulk add a few dollars to their cost and call it a day, they sell them as is with next to no warranty and nothing included with them, as a business I spend abit more to buy retail just because of this fact, none of the systems I build have any oem products in them.

WC

By contrast, all of my systems have at least one OEM part. I love it, I save money and I have had 0% failure on OEM products so far. Procs, RAM, hard drives, CD drives, etc. I save between 5 and 10% buying OEM, and the store I buy from gives me 90 days to return defective hardware if anything does go wrong.

I don't know about that, I've bought plenty of OEM hardware that came with software.

But, like others have said, the primary differences between retail and OEM are the box, and possibly warranty differences.

Sometimes OEM hardware isn't quite as "tuned" (or tunable) as retail. There were some ATI cards a year or so ago, that I know of - it may still be going on - but the OEM version of the card was basically it, there was nothing you could do to it. The Retail version of the card had a slightly different chip in it that would allow you to overclock it. I can't remember the model number of the card, but they were OEM and retail versions of the same card, and there were physical differences.