Gigabyte releases Sandy Bridge SATA checker utility

[clifford_cooley]

Gigabyte releases Sandy Bridge SATA checker utility

The past few days have seen some of the world's biggest companies in the computer industry announce replacement and repair programs to deal with Intel's 6-Series chipset flaw. PC makers including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Toshiba have pulled systems from their online and retail stores, while motherboard makers Asus, Gigabyte and MSI have pledged to offer customers hassle-free solutions in what is expected to be a costly recall for the chip giant.

Sandy Bridge SATA checker utility

 

[Mychael]

Glad I did not do an MoBo upgrade then.

 

[Nibiru2012]

These Intel "6x" Sandy Bridge Series chipsets are having flaws of about 20-25% or so. It will be a costly recall for Intel for sure. I heard somewhere around $700 million or so. But then it's Intel and they can afford it.

From Engadget.com:

Intel raised quite a few eyebrows yesterday by disclosing that its Cougar Point chipsets suffer from an incurable design issue that would potentially degrade Serial ATA transfers over time. AnandTech has gone to the trouble of getting in touch with Intel to seek more information and the problem, as it turns out, is a single transistor that's prone to a higher current leakage than tolerable. This can not only diminish performance over the 3Gbps SATA ports, it can actually make them fail altogether.

There is more comforting news, however, in that the pair of 6Gbps SATA ports on the chipset are untroubled by this ailment, so devices and users that never plug into the 3Gbps connections can just carry on as if nothing's ever happened.

For everyone else, a repair and replacement service is taking place now, with Intel's budget for dealing with this problem said to be a generous $700 million.

From PC Magazine:
Not everyone will notice this issue, at least right away. The error is reportedly a relatively hard-to-notice one that crops up only after very long periods of usage (Intel estimates a speed degradation of 6 percent over a three-year lifespan), so ordinary users probably won't notice anything yet. (Intel's hardware partners discovered it when doing intensive stress-testing on Sandy Bridge hardware.)

 

[clifford_cooley]

Intel resumes chipset shipments for PCs not affected by flaw

Roughly a week after announcing a design flaw in the "Cougar Point" chipset tied to its Sandy Bridge processor platform, Intel has announced it is resuming shipments of the defective part to manufacturers that plan to use it in systems that won't be affected by the glitch. Those systems could include "closed" notebook configurations using only the unaffected ports 0 & 1 (SATA III 6Gbps) as well as desktop PCs that ship with a PCI Express add-in card.

Read more here - http://www.techspot.com/news/42310-intel-resumes-chipset-shipments-for-pcs-not-affected-by-flaw.html