Motherboards Intel Recalling SandyBridge Chipsets (P67/H67)

Well I'm gonna hang on to my SB setup. As has been mentioned, there's no point in RMA'ing and having to wait a couple of months. My system is still good as gold anyhow. Should a problem arise, then my opinion / course of action may change. But for the time being, I'm all good.

 

If it's not a mandatory recall then I see no reason for them to cease supporting it. It's the chipset at fault, afterall. What will be different in an April board versus a January board? An ever so slightly different chipset and some of the minor tweaks which they managed to implement in the few available months. Who knows, some manufacturers might not make any tweaks at all, let alone major BIOS changes.

Of course, if I am wrong and some huge changes are made in my model of motherboard then an RMA may happen in April, but it's not looking likely.

The beauty of resale value is that it only applies to those who resell

 

I have a feeling that if Intel are paying for the recall, manufacturers will want to get all recalls out of the way before Intel decide to stop funding it. The manufacturers will not want this dragging on for years to come. Will this make it a "mandatory" recall? Who knows...

 

But it's only going to affect their stock price because they announced it like this.

Had they just acknowledged the defect when people noticed it and replaced the hardware of people who were affected they'd probably end up replacing 2-3% of the chipsets currently out there.

What they've effectively done is announced "they're all broken! send them back!", so they're going to see an absolute torrent of RMA'd and withdrawn hardware, which will all have to be shipped about, examined, fixed etc at their cost. If their figures are correct the vast majority of the hardware they replace/fix will be perfectly fine, perhaps 90% of it.

So they're either a) going for the "most saintly manufacturer" award and admitting to a tiny problem, treating it like a big issue, or b) it really is a big issue and there's something we've not yet been told.

Given Intel are at the end of the day out of make money, I am leaning toward option B. I suppose it is possible that they're just trying to get some +rep off the back of a minor issue but they dominate the market already, so it would be out of character. Usually it's the little guys who are nice and the big guys who have so many customers they don't really care about them all that much (think small independent store vs. supermarket).

 

Yeah. I don't need the 3gig ports. I have an SSD, a DVD-RW that I never use, and a 500gig hard drive that I never use. I have two internal 6gig ports, two esata 6gig ports, and USB3.0 ports so I'm totally fine.

I keep my hardware for awhile, though. I don't want to have dead SATA 3gig ports in the future. Chances are that when Haswell (not Ivy Bridge, that's evolutionary not revolutionary) comes out, I'll end up getting a new rig and using my current SB for a HTPC or server, which is a situation where I would want to have all of the SATA ports operational since I'll be running a bunch of hard drives in it. If there's a finite RMA window for getting it fixed, I'll do that.

For a gaming rig, though, all I need is one SSD. Don't need anything mechanical.

 

I'm also hoping that Gigabyte will have EFI by then

 

Damn, I missed this thread. I think it's been hyped already. As people have said, it's more for the investors so they are aware. The stock price is exactly the same now as earlier. As why would the investors care Intel made nearly $4 BILLION(!!!!) profit in just Q4 of last year!!!! So it's profits may only be $3 billion in Q1 of this year...

And if they've been testing it for, what 6-8 months, then it's a very long term problem that will only truely affect OEM's as it'll rape any 3 year warranties.

Life goes on.

AMD have a party at the 0.25 share increase.

OEM's fill their warranty pot for later.

 

By the sounds of it more than 5% of ASUS P67 boards are faulty from the off, so a 5% chance of some sata ports performance degredation is small fish really

 

Intel have to disclose. Legal requirement

End Of story. They still outclass AMD on every level.

Nothing to see here

 

Looks like my P8P67 has a 2 port marvell 6gbps SATA controller. The rest of my drives are on my sexy looking rocketraid 2680, so unless intel/etailer ships me a new mobo first, I'm not sending the current one back.

 

Not just that but the fact Intel has to inspire confidence in its products. If it admits to a statistical anomaly and spends $700 Million on reissuing motherboards, when business' consider Intel products they have the confidence that parts on the market are 100% reliable. Reliability and confidence is Intel's business model. Well done to Intel for sticking to that, unlike Nvidia that tried to brush its 'bumpgate' under the carpet, until it caved under a mountain of RMAs.

I worry less about Intel but more the rest of the industry. The memory companies are struggling to say the least, and it will make a massive hit on the motherboard industry here in TW (unless Intel reimburses EVERYTHING: labour cost, manuf. new boards, delivery and logistics etc).

Since Intel isn't even going to ship the chipsets until the end of this month, it'll take another ~2 weeks to get first batches out, then another 4 weeks to put them on a boat and get them to the EU/US (only the most expensive boards will go by air). We're basically gonna have a quarter where there's virtually no market: no one will want AMD since they have new products soon and no one will want to subst in older LGA1156 because the socket is dead.

If you already own a product don't panic, I doubt it'll really affect anyone tbh: of all the boards they sold it took Intel to notice it themselves and not any performance user.

EDIT: Wrong it was performance users.

 

ah it was under motherboard I was looking under CPU which is why I couldn't find it >.> Sorry for the double topic.

Do u think this'll affect the release of sandy bridge laptops?

 

$1billion, this is one costly problem!

I can't help but wonder how retailers are going to cope because, as bindi said, no one is going to want to buy 1155 until this problem is fixed. Also no one will buy AMD with new parts looming.
Not many are going to be buying new computers on the whole so retailers are surely going to take a big hit on this, along with the manufacturers and Intel.

I retract my little giggle earlier as I didn't quite realise the implications this recall could have on the industry as a whole.

 

I have my CPU back to stock settings for now, just in case it transpires that there's more than simply a SATA chipset issue.
I am sure there is more to this than 'just a few dodgy chipsets that only affect a small percentage of SATA 2 operations', for Intel to impliment such a recall.
A tad gutting after you have spent almost two and a half grand on a shiny new SB system.

 

Yes and no. Most laptops only use the one port, two at most, and the SATA 6Gbps ports are unaffected so laptop makers could just use those exclusively and get away with it. Laptops that offer extra connectors like RAID with eSATA will have to delay though.

 

Realistically over a 3 year period you're going to loose performance through electromigration. If Intel are making this big a deal about it we must be talking serious performance loss. I'd guess we're looking at bandwidth dropping to <10Mb/s maybe <1Mb/s. People would notice and Intel would get ripped apart. (i.e. consumer confidence would be damaged) *scratch that* it's port failure

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-cougar-point-sata-bug

 

does this mean I can get out my old "Error Inside" TShirt!?

 

I think the bit-tech guide to overclocking Sandy Bridge may need an "adjustment"

 

Is Bit-tech going to put details of this problem on the front page??

All of the other major technology websites have done it already.

 

I'm going to assume they'll do a full write up on it, hence the delay. They like to be fully informed remember...