P67 (Sandy Bridge) Chipset Design Flaw

[SithTracy]

Intel Identifies Chipset Design Error, Implementing Solution

And I just built a new Sandy Bridge rig and now I get to go through a RMA process. Fun stuff.

[Ian]

Yeah, that sucks for people that already bought a Sandy Bridge computer. Not a cheap mistake for Intel either.

Intel expects this issue to reduce revenue by approximately $300 million as the company discontinues production of the current version of the chipset and begins manufacturing the new version.

I'm guessing they'll come out with some lame driver fix that degrades SATA performance.

[Dartman]

Well I just upgraded to a 1090t AMD hex core CPU, win7 64, and 8 gig of ram so I guess I'm safe from that one Still getting all my stuff loaded back in and making sure all my drivers and hardware are working. New board has 0 IDE ports, 0 floppy ports, and 7 SATA ports that all support SATA 6mbs or whatever the latest version is, and some USB 3 ports, no serial ports either.
Lucky I have a few IDE to SATA adapters lying around or I'd have to retire my trusty 1655 and my LGh22n burners. I also got a ATI 4870x2 to replace the 3870x2 I've been running for a year or so
Sometimes staying a generation back saves you money and headaches and is still plenty damned fast.

[Ian]

More details on the flaw from CNet.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20030070-64.html

Issue: Affects SATA ports 2 through 5, not ports 0 and 1. Most laptops have two SATA devices, such as a hard disk drive and optical drive that would be using the unaffected ports 0 and 1. That said, Sandy Bridge-based systems with more than a couple of SATA devices could potentially be affected. The data itself is not affected. So, if a consumer had an affected system, data could be accessed by moving the storage device to another system or a working port.

[SithTracy]

Lesson learned, don't buy into Intel hype!!! Stick with AMD! Already retired the "Sandy Beached Whale" and using my wifes AMD Phenom II x3 720 until something gets sorted out. Have been in contact with both ASUS and NewEgg. NewEgg being the most helpful at this point. I may RMA the whole kit and go with a Phenom II x6 1100 rig was leaning that way before I read into Sandy Bridge. NewEgg pulled all Sandy Bridge and 1155 socket CPU's for now

[Dartman]

Well your one option to make it happy cheap is get a outboard SATA card and run your extra drives on that if you want to run more then the first two onboard ports.
I have done that with my previous board that didn't have enough SATA ports left to run ALL of the DVD burners I have collected in my full tower stacker case (7). It had 6 internal ports and 4 of them were used for hard drives so I only had room for two extra SATA burners and one IDE port for my old 1655 and LG h22n IDE legacy burners.
I added a cheap sil 3124 SATA 300 4 port card and it supports optical drives even with the raid drivers loaded and also works great in win7 64 with the 64 bit drivers.
I paid 30 something shipped on Ebay and there usually are quite a few listed. It's a option and actually detects and boots pretty quickly and can do various raid options with hard drives if you want as well and is firmware upgradable.

[SithTracy]

I've got a spare SATA card, just not worth the hassle because at some point I have to ship the MB back to ASUS or the Egg. That's up in the air right now as both have told me Intel has not communicated more than the public already knows. I got spare working AMD Phenom II rigs (790FX chipset).

[Dartman]

Yep, that's the chipset the board I just replaced uses. I would have kept plugging away with it and win7 32 bit and eventually put the fastest chip it could support which probably would have been a faster quad core or a 6 core but my geek friend builds systems and networks for a living and just upgraded to a hex core 1100 AMD with a new board and memory so he had his low miles 1090 and board for cheap to offset his upgrade costs a bit Good for me.
I guess it's not worth the effort then but if you decided you didn't want to trade back that would be a option.
I have a board that for some reason only one specific SATA port will not go faster then multi word dma 2 or whatever and it really messed with the drives on that port for me. I think I just decided not to use that port for anything, or maybe just a CDRW drive, good thing is it had 4 IDE and 8 SATA ports so wasn't quite as critical that one didn't work right.

[Ian]

MB manufacturers are finally responding...

ASUS - http://event.asus.com/2011/SandyBridge/notice/

MSI - http://www.msi.com/news-media/news/1176.html

GIGABYTE - http://www.gigabyte.com/press-center/ne ... px?nid=984 and http://gigabytedaily.blogspot.com/2011/ ... ues-q.html

[Ian]

GIGABYTE Releases 6 Series SATA Check Utility to Help Optimize Performance of P67 & H67 Motherboard

To help our customers optimize SATA performance on their 6 series motherboards, GIGABYTE hascreated an easy to use utility called the GIGABYTE 6 Series SATA Check that tells you if the SATA ports that you are using are in fact the affected Intel PCH SATA 2.0 ports. It also recommends that you change your SATA devices to the white SATA 3.0 ports. The utility is a simple program that will work on any 6 series chipset based motherboard, and has 3 possible scenarios that offer different advice for users to configure their SATA devices.

http://www.gigabyte.us/press-center/new ... x?nid=-865

[SithTracy]

Really? My eyes can tell me that!! I guess it will work for some people but I can't imagine there are any Dell's or anything on the Sandy Bridge platform. Mostly the enthusiasts would have them at this stage.