they honored my warranty with my retail amd 2100+as long as you keep your packaged hs/f they use the # on the fan to insure that it is a retail CPU with hs/f they sent me a new cpu with no exlpanation on what went wrong just sent me a new one with instructions on how to instal
and i used AS3 and a different hs/f but still had my retail hsF
I read somewhere that AS looses it's effectiveness over time and needs to be replaced periodically. If this is true then maybe they are worried about people not replacing it and ending up with a fried cpu.