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Asus, Gigabyte To Replace All Sandy Bridge Boards

Posted by samzenpus on from the return-to-sender dept.

J. Dzhugashvili writes "In the wake of Intel's announcement that all existing Sandy Bridge chipsets have a bug that causes degraded Serial ATA performance, top-tier motherboard makers Asus and Gigabyte have made public statements regarding their return policy for affected boards. Asus is promising 'hassle-free return and/or replacement', while Gigabyte says owners of affected boards are entitled to a full refund or replacement—and it recommends that users seek refunds. Both companies are advising users to contact the original place of purchase to proceed. On a related note, Gigabyte has announced that new Sandy Bridge motherboards with bug-free chipsets will be available in volume in April."

3 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. More tech detail by FrankSchwab · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the chipheads, Anandtech has a good description of the underlying problem:
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-cougar-point-sata-bug

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    And the worms ate into his brain.
  2. Cougar Point, not Sandy Bridge by pablodiazgutierrez · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cougar Point is a chipset (the set of circuits that normally come in a motherboard, separate from the CPU). Sandy Bridge is a family of processors. The announced problem is with the former, not the latter. A lot of tech news outlets are spreading the misinformation and causing quite a mess.

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    To do list for Windows
  3. Re:I'll take one! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You have to have tight control of the rework temperatures and times, or you get intermetallic growth which hurts reliability. We verify all of our solder stations every eight hours using a calibrated thermocouple just to be safe. But yes, reworked solder joints can be very reliable.

    We make the electronics that go into certain very valuable aircraft. We do low-volume, high-mix production, with batch sizes as low as one board. Since it's hard to work out the kinks in a production process until you've built a few hundred or thousand boards, our units generally have as many as 14 defects on EACH UNIT. Most of those just need a quick touchup with a soldering iron, but we often have to replace ball-grid-array and pin-grid-array processors. The reworked units then go into production aircraft, and (knock on wood) function reliably for decades.

    Posting as AC for obvious reasons.