Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Denon DRA-685 vs. Harmon Kardon HK 3480

running at the 1/4mi track is a fun, but still can't compare to the thrill of running AWAY from all those five-o who tried to crack down on street racing!! there's nothing more exciting than watching those flashy blue and red stropes disappearing in your rear-view mirror after you'd flipped the switch and let the juice do its magic :-)

I'm a bit late on this thread, but getting back to the microprocessor burn-in issue. The burn-in process during manufacturing has nothing to do with performance change or break-in, at least not as far as I've ever heard. There are two failure modes that are brought out during this process. The first is infant mortality - basically fab defects in the die. The second is ionic contamination. This situation causes mobile ions in the transistors to collect at the junctions when the transistors are powered up and run at high temperature. These extra ions cause the junction characteristics to shift which can cause out of spec behavior. The burn-in temperatures depend on the type of voltages present on the chips. I've worked with 105C and 137C burn-in. The time is also dependent upon what the IC specs are. These are derived from some MIL standard. I spent 4 years working with burn-in processes and never once heard about performance-variation being a factor in burn-in - and this was with with analog and digital circuits for pacemakers and defibs, which are a bit more critical than audio equipment. If it was a real phenomenon, I would think that it would be a factor in that industry. Just my .02

Pete

I have been in this IT field for 15 years, As a PC technician and QC specialist for the first 10 years, of ALL cpu that I overclocked in the past decade gave me the exact same result, no exception. I was ALWAYS be able to either clock them higher, or lower the vcore voltage after a period of burn-in.
I'll give you the most recent example, my AMD Barton 2500, this is one of many overclocking champ out there. This chip can go all the way up to 1.90v(motherboard limitation) at any given clock speed. Right out of the box I installed this cpu, along with a heatpipe copper heatsink and 7500rpm cpu fan, I was able to clock this sucker up to 208 FSB x11 @1.85v, Prime95 crashed at 19hr, I had to clock down the FSB to 206 to get it past 24hr @Prime95, Vcore had to remain at or above 1.85v otherwise it's crash city. As usual, I let the Prime95 ran in the background for about a week.
I was able to pumped up the FSB to 222 x11 @1.85v a week later, past 24hr Prime95, then after couple days of tweaking and Prime95 testing, the cpu remain 100% stable at 222FSB x11, Vcore was dropped to 1.75v without any problem whatsoever. REMEMBER, this chip is AIR-COOLED, no water-block being use, no Peltier, none of those exotic cooling devices.
If you'd ever get involved in any serious overclocking, then you should of known how burning in the processor effects the end result you get, Be it Intel or AMD, they ALWAYS, ALWAYS...can run at either 1)lower vcore, or 2)higher clock speed, after a period of burn in or usage. If you know overclocking, then you should also know how burning in(or period of usage) effect the thermal compound and the cpu temperature as well. This is no myth, this is no magic, this is no rocket science either.

FOR Anyone else who said the process of burning-in has absolutely no effect on cpu's performance and how it behave afterward, please do yourself a favor, do some research and learn the art of overclocking, try to experience what overclocking is all about in the real world(instead of in your la-la-land!!), get some hands on experience and see for yourself how burning in(or broken-in) processor has effect on its performance. If you come back and tell me that you didn't see any difference, then either 1)you don't know exactly what the heck you were doing, or 2)you are one of the biggest liar in the world and ought to get your name in the Guiness book!! :-)

I thought we were takling about chips in amplifiers, not computers. Unless you're saying people overclock the processors in their amplifiers, then yes, burn-in makes no difference on an amplifier's performance.

Pmbuko, we were debating over CPU for PC, though I have never heard of anybody overclock their DAC/ADC or DSP chips though. :-)