original equipment manufacturer; a company that manufactures a given piece of hardware (unlike a value-added reseller, which changes and repackages the hardware)
but basically, oem hardware comes in a dinky little cardboard box while retail comes in plastic packaging with labels and all... i believe oem is cheaper
Retail will come with a manual and cd/software whereas oem you get just the product/thats it...
What item(s) were you lookin at? Something like a harddrive/dvd drive go oem cause its cheaper...something like a CPU get retail cause itll come with a heatsink and instructions etc...
this being my first build i just want to make sure i get cable fans etc. instructions ? all that good stuff i need. i dont want to get all this stuff then find out i need cables and such.
right now the only OEM pats i have picked is the Hard Drive, which i'm thinking of getting that from a brick and mortar store and the OS which i am researching now.
Get these parts OEM: Hard drive, CD/DVD drives, floppy drive (if you really need one), maybe RAM, and definately the OS. OEM XP is like almost half the price of the retail version.
Basiclly OEM OS is fine-some people argue that tech support for OEM disc stinks-Have you ever called MicroSoft tech support? You will have better luck finding answers in a forum like this. Hard drives and optical drives and the like go with OEM-the warranties are usually the same-always buy retail CPU's the warrantees are 3 years compared to 30 days for OEM. Vidoe cards can go either way-sometimes they come with cool game packs in the retail box-not so with OEM-and lots of times retail is not that much more.
do OEM always have the required cords? I purchased an oem WD HD and a NEC dvd drive and I'm wondering if I should go buy some extra cables at my local shop before they get here.