Sandy Bridge problems

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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The interesting issue here is who Intel's customers are in this case. Just as with the nVidia GPU recall, Intel didn't sell those chips to us directly (well, unless you have an Intel board), but rather to Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Foxconn and any other members of the usual gang of idiots.
 

mubs

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How will we know that a board is using the fixed chips? I don't want to end up with the bad chipset someday!
 

time

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I think LiamC with his cheaper but RELIABLE Phenom X6 is entitled to a pretty major gloat at this point.
 

LunarMist

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Bah, early adoption sucks. :( I'll wait for at least 6 cores. Maybe the chipsets will be fixed by then.
 

Buck

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I gladly am putting off any SB build for a few months. The previous generation Core i selections are good chips, and Athlons still make for nice budget systems.
 

MaxBurn

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I hear you Buck, I feel like I just got this system and it is amazingly fast to me. Not looking for a replacement any time soon.
 

BingBangBop

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It seems as though SB motherboards are back in Newegg (B3 version chipsets) but in extremely limited supply. I tried building a new system and by the time I had all the parts accumulated in the shopping cart, the motherboards had sold out.
 

Adcadet

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I think I may have just been bitten by the bug. Came home from work this morning, computer was frozen. This rarely happens, but as mentioned elsewhere, I've been playing with some new programs (Dexpot). Computer would take forever in the BIOS to get to my boot menu, and Windows wouldn't boot. Tried the repair option, gave me a BSOD (IRQ error, I think I saw). After multiple reboot attempts, Windows would boot up very slowly but would eventually give me an Explorer.exe error and I couldn't open up My Computer. I've since taken drives off of the SATA 3 Gbps ports and things are fine now. Slightly annoying to be limited to just 4 drives but I think I'll live. The most intense thing I'd do on the 3 Gbps ports was a nightly backup that used ~400 GB in total (not sure if Windows would do the write incrementally or just re-write the whole thing).

Good thing I just faxed in the advanced replacement form to Asus.
 

CougTek

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The problem is supposed to take around 3 years to develop. 400GB of daily transfer certainly is more than your average Joe's usage patern, but I doubt it will kill the ports in something like two months.

Either way, the board is still under warranty. Our thanks for having played the Guinea pig.
 

time

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Perhaps "3 years" is just the party line? The estimated failure rate ranges from 5 to 15%, so I think they were guessing.

Bad news for those of us who unwittingly supplied 'faulty' motherboards. :-?
 

CougTek

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I sold one, but connected both drives (one optical, one HDD) to the SATA 6Gbps ports. It will be fine as the customer won't add another hard drive in the system. I informed the customer before selling the board. He didn't want to wait for a replacement.
 

LiamC

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It's been the thing that has been holding me back on buying a SB or two for folding, gotta make it hard for SSDrueding :)
 

LiamC

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At the rate you're catching me, I need to hurry.

Actually, I wanted to wait for AMDs bulldozer due ~ 20 June. I think that the 4-module/8 integer core models will be folding monsters, but you aren't giving me time to wait.
 

Adcadet

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Just got my replacement board from Asus today, along with an email and FedEx instructions. It only took them 5-6 days to get me the board after faxing in the form for the credit card hold. Not bad.
 

Adcadet

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wow, just found that in the box they included an HS-101 notebook headset along with a PS on the bottom of the letter explaining that they hope I accept them as a token of appreciation. Not sure if it's crap or not, but I appreciate the gesture.
 

Sol

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Indeed, posted in the wrong thread. My bad.

Was joking about the no-reboot-CPU-swap thing. Although, I seem to recall a long while ago that some very large multi-CPU system was designed to allow different CPUs to be shut down and swapped.

I did simply swap everything. Unfortunately, I've found some weirdness. Had to re-install my USB3 driver to get my USB3 ports to work. And my PCI sound card doesn't work. When I try to uninstall/reinstall the driver, it says no card is detected. My board only has a single PCI slot, so I can't test to see if it's the slot or card. And I've found some funkiness with SATA ports. My old 74 GB raptor is happy to sit on either the 3 or 6 Gpbs Intel ports, but refuses to be detected on the Marvell ports. I've tried swapping the cable, which had gone through an extreme angle, bu this didn't help. On the other hand, I can now run my board stable at 103x48, as compared to 103x47 or 100x48. And my memory was auto-detected with less fuss than on the old board. No idea if it's related, but the new board came with a newer (the newest) BIOS.

I had the same issue swapping between Asus P67 boards (Both B3s but only one with PCI slots), the driver for whatever chip the PCI slots hang off is referred to as a manager of some description on the driver disk so I assumed it was some useless crap I didn't need and didn't install it.
 

Adcadet

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I had the same issue swapping between Asus P67 boards (Both B3s but only one with PCI slots), the driver for whatever chip the PCI slots hang off is referred to as a manager of some description on the driver disk so I assumed it was some useless crap I didn't need and didn't install it.
Over the weekend I successfully re-installed my old Sound Card. I guess uninstalling the software and re-installing it did the trick.

I still wonder why my Raptor isn't usable on the Marvel controller, though. Perhaps a driver re-install would do the trick? Although now I've got the ports arranged so that everything is working well so I'm not sure it's worth the effort. But why would a controller issue affect a single hard drive and not others?
 

Mercutio

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But why would a controller issue affect a single hard drive and not others?

Firmware-level incompatibility?

I've run into older 1.5Gbps SATA RAID cards that don't want to work with 3Gbps drives a couple times. That one always surprises me a little, because the specifications are supposed to be backward-compatible.
 

Stereodude

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So I came home today to find that one of my new craptacular 2TB 7200RPM Hitachi drives that had been marked as "unreadable" by Windows XP. I couldn't read anything off it, and Windows XP was giving the delayed write failure message in the system tray. The Disk Management Console listed it as "Unreadable". And, tada! It's attached to one of the 4 vulnerable Sandy Bridge SATA-II ports.

After powering off the PC and turning it back on the BIOS detected it and it seems that I can now read data from it. Not sure if this is the Sandy Bridge SATA recall bug or just another sign I should run away screaming from these Hitachi drives.
 

LunarMist

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Why are you using the SandBridge ports after knowing that they are defective? :crap:
 

Stereodude

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Why are you using the SandBridge ports after knowing that they are defective? :crap:
Because I have more than 2 SATA devices in the system. :rambo:

And, I didn't expect the ports would fail so quickly (assuming that's the reason for the failure). This drive has only been spinning for a week on one of the ports.
 

time

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Why do I have the uneasy feeling that Intel may have been lying about the frequency of the bug? The PR story was 5-15% over a number of years, now commonly assumed to be just 5%. But my local supplier told me that they had had heaps of returns with actual failures.
 
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