A few pages back there was some discussion on problems with some credit union cards defaulting to chip+sig when chip+pin is possible. So I emailed PenFed and asked if they could configure their cards to default to chip+pin first instead of chip+sig. Their reply is:

"Our Credit Card department has advised that PenFed cannot change the authorization configuration. It is the merchant's discretion as to what the method they choose to attempt first when processing an authorization for a PenFed chip credit card."

Essentially it depends on how each individual machine is configured and used.