Hardware The True Cost of the Intel Sandy Bridge Cock-Up

The Intel 6-series chipset fiasco has cost some companies half their turnover, we found out more



http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/02/11/true-cost-sandy-bridge-cougar-point/1

 

"After pledging to ship out sacks of fixed and chips..." - beginning of 2nd paragraph.

 

Cheers, fixed.

 

Hmmm, fixed and chips.

 

Great article, and an interesting read.

 

Can't they just sell us all the broken boards cheap - I'd buy one?

Like the article says the 2 sata 3 ports work, and as long as you buy a motherboard with a secondary sata controller which many have you've got 4 or more sata ports. That's plenty for most people, and you always have the backup of buying a sata pcie card if for some reason you decide you need to install 10 HD's.

 

Funnily enough I was eating them whilst reading the article...

OT: I wonder if retailers will sell the new B3 revision boards at the same price as B2, given the pent up demand.

Also, does anyone else think that the B3 revision boards will be amongst the most tested chipset/boards in creation, both by Intel and the manufacturers, purely to avoid this kind of commercial embarrassment?

 

So scan are not going to offer a swap out option after all for system builds, have they changed there mind despite it still saying so on the homepage of there site??


Elan Raja, director of UK retailer and system builder Scan, put it all down to market forces. 'On the day when the issue hit the market, we pulled everything, and when we pulled everything eBuyer followed suit, Dabs followed suit – the only company that didn't follow suit was Overclockers. So, all of a sudden, there was this mad rush of people thinking Overclockers had this magic chipset that the issue didn't affect, but that's not the case. So, therefore, everyone went live again on the basis that no one's willing to lose a sale.'

However, Raja also points out that any products based on Intel's 6-series chipsets that are sold after 31 January are now the liability of the retailer, as opposed to the OEM partner or even Intel.

'We've got systems we're selling, says Raja, 'but we're selling them with the knowledge that we've got a solution already in place. As the orders are coming in, we're actively contacting the customers and telling them that these are their options: they can either go for an Asus board with a Marvell chipset, they could have an additional SATA card added, or you can wait until a given date and we'll build you a system with the new revision of boards.'

 

No, they're still offering a swap-out option too.

 

Below is a true example as to how this is costing companies like scan business...

Just before the P67 problem was announced I had priced up both a Scan XS system and also a self build. The cost was around £1400 and £1200 respectively.. Or there abouts.

After the announcement I decided not to proceed and just upgrade my GPU for my current Q9550 @3.6 Ghz based system instead. And a nice improvement I've seen from that GTX570 too from my old 260.

I will now probably hold off until I see how my machine copes with Battlefield 3 later this year.

Had intel not announced the problem, I would have a new sandy bridge PC right now.

 

Crank that Q9550 to as close to 4ghz as possible and youre good for a while longer. Highend C2Q's are still good. they aint no i7 but they still provide plenty of grunt for games.

 

This isn't an issue that you can fix by (sampling) simply installing a third-party SATA card

 

well, at least i'm glad to know that my decision of not buying any of intel's new products didn't result in my money going into them fixing their mistakes.

 

So would I!

 

"This also raises another question, of course, which is: 'What happens to all the old boards with the B2 silicon?' No one we asked was able to give us a solid answer to this, but the general consensus was that it wasn't possible to just resolder the new chips into the old boards on a mass-production basis."

**Cough, cough** Give them away at a highly discounted *cough* price? Please?

 

I'll just build another i7-870/Asus Maximus Formula PC thanks !

dunx

 

I'd be interested to know if retailers will even want the boards back?

I mena why pay to ship and store something that you cant even re-sell? I'd just send consumers the new board as I was going to anyway and let them keep the faulty unrepairable one....win for the consumer as they can sell the dodgey board at a discount or the new board!

 

You say that this issue would have affected the entire IT industry but I think you have to put in perspective that, right now the majority of systems being sold are value systems, especially in the desktop area and substantially in the laptop area. People want cheap, cheap and more cheap. It's only the Enthusiasts and Professional’s who are going to be thinking of shelling out for something like a quad core Sandy Bridge at any rate. At work we've sold almost 30,000 machines during our time trading (probably more if you include the "upgraded systems" that are complete rebuilds), we've won awards for this that and the other but at the end of the day ~60% of our Desktop Custom Assembled builds are <£300, sans OS machines, generally with an AM3 or 775 CPU. Yep you read that right. 775.

Why?

The Pentium 775 Chips are cheap and have more than enough performance to handle a bit of web browsing and light work, a decent motherboard with integrated graphics and what have you can be had for ~£35 and HDD's and Opticals are cheap as chips. Only about 35% of our systems are 1156 (mainly i3 530's) and only ~5% are anything higher than that. the thing that seems to be forgotten is you're average customer doesn't care about "upgrading" or "future-proofing" they care about Value. So the fact we build systems with 2 year warranties for less than £200 that will do all you're general work appeals massively to your average Joe.

In summary I think you're overplaying this problem. Yes it's bad, yeah it's an inconvenience for a few pro's and enthusiasts but at the end of the day as a proportion of overall system sales, I don't think it makes much of a difference. Obviously on the other side of the coin if you are a retailer selling almost exclusively to the higher end market (Overclockers for e.g.) then this is a much bigger issue. Just I still feel that the people writing this article need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

>Purposefully didn't include company name as I don't want to be seen on here as Advertising I just want to get my point across.

 

This would cannibalise their own sales of functional boards, so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot (to some extent)

You say that but the average PC Component retailer takes between 5 and 10 percent of the sale price. (lower if the company is bigger) Scan will be at the low end of this because they're competitive.
For examples sake, if you ordered a £1300 basket, @5% profit they'd make £65. hardly massive for them.

 

'We're not convinced by this, though. Okay, so you can swap out your motherboard later, but this is a massive inconvenience that's not accounted for in the cost of the board, which won't be discounted. Also, board partners haven't even seen the new B3 silicon yet, and we certainly haven't had a chance to test it. It may work fine, but we would strongly recommend that you don't buy a faulty product based on an unreleased fix sorting out the problem in the future. '

Do you also include games released with ruinous bugs in this statement?