Intel Recall on 6-series, Cougar Point SATA, Sandy Bridge Chipset Recalled

[gongo]

I heard non-K Sandys can do limited overclocking of 4 bins.....how does it work..? ...on top of Turbo Boost...a.k.a...the 4 extra bins are free ..or it works in place of Turbo Boost?

Should i change to a Sandy powered PC...with a time bomb now...and hope Intel will "compensate" early adopters...with goodies? How did Intel deal with past hardware bombs?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Each bin can individually be boosted up to 4 times. So, a non-K 2500 would be limited to 3.7 (4 cores loaded) - 4.1 (1 core loaded) ghz. Almost all reports I've seen for 2500k has it able to hit 4.4 ghz (4 cores loaded) on air at stock voltage. Whether that's worth an extra 20 USD or so is up to the end user.

Regards,
SB

 

[I.S.T.]

I dont share your faith swaaye

weve had bumgate, around the same time there was a problem with some brand of hard drive and the company spent months in deny mode, we had apple with the iphone, first there was no problem, then it was users holding it wrong, then it was fine just the signal display was incorrect, then the sort of owned up

That was Seagate.

 

[nutball]

That was Seagate.

Funny, I thought it was WD and the crowd-sourced hysteria over head parks on their Green drives (which turned out to be a heap of crap anyway, which was why the company was denying there was a problem in the first place).

 

[I.S.T.]

Funny, I thought it was WD and the crowd-sourced hysteria over head parks on their Green drives (which turned out to be a heap of crap anyway, which was why the company was denying there was a problem in the first place).

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=51644

Took me like ten minutes to track the thread down. I was looking in the wrong forums.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, there's also been the issue with silent data loss on Samsungs recent F4 series of HDDs when S.M.A.R.T. data is requested and provided to the system during data transfers. They've already released a firmware update for it.

The WD problem was real, but only if you used it in a system with frequent read/writes combined with enough time for the heads to park. Mostly observed when used as replacements in DVR's or in some RAID setups or 24/7 media/data servers. WD now releases a 24/7 Green drive in addition to the Green drives with more aggressive head parking.

Intel's second gen SSD's also had a problem that I can't remember now (didn't result in data loss, just lower than expected performance), but they were pretty good about getting it taken care of quickly with a firmware update.

Could go on and on about mass storage device problems over the past few years. But most of them are situations where the majority of users would never run into it to trigger it. And most have been taken care of rather quickly.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

It seems to me that today with the ease of end user intercommunication by the Internet that companies have learned to not screw around too much if there's a widespread flaw because their reputation will be killed very quickly by word of mouth. Lawsuits come along shorthly thereafter too. Bumpgate had its lawsuit and those affected had the opportunity to claim.

 

[I.S.T.]

Well, there's also been the issue with silent data loss on Samsungs recent F4 series of HDDs when S.M.A.R.T. data is requested and provided to the system during data transfers. They've already released a firmware update for it.

The WD problem was real, but only if you used it in a system with frequent read/writes combined with enough time for the heads to park. Mostly observed when used as replacements in DVR's or in some RAID setups or 24/7 media/data servers. WD now releases a 24/7 Green drive in addition to the Green drives with more aggressive head parking.

Intel's second gen SSD's also had a problem that I can't remember now (didn't result in data loss, just lower than expected performance), but they were pretty good about getting it taken care of quickly with a firmware update.

Could go on and on about mass storage device problems over the past few years. But most of them are situations where the majority of users would never run into it to trigger it. And most have been taken care of rather quickly.

Regards,
SB

...Fuck I got me one of those F4 drives.

 

[BRiT]

Well, there's also been the issue with silent data loss on Samsungs recent F4 series of HDDs when S.M.A.R.T. data is requested and provided to the system during data transfers. They've already released a firmware update for it.

They did a really low dirty thing when they released the firmware fix. They kept the same firmware version numbers. Now no one can tell if they have the fixed firmware version or not other than to do a firmware flash. When it's done, you still have no real confirmed way of knowing the flash was successful other than trying to duplicate the issue.

I attribute the not changing the firmware version number directly to being a dirty, evil and underhanded company for trying to sweep the issue under the rug before anyone notices. Shame on you Samsung!

 

[Blazkowicz]

well you might be able to dump the drive's firmware and make a diff against the newer one. but indeed that's crap!

 

[Davros]

It seems to me that today with the ease of end user intercommunication by the Internet that companies have learned to not screw around too much if there's a widespread flaw because their reputation will be killed very quickly by word of mouth.

Again apart from intel what companies are you referring too, they all try to sweep the issue under the carpet and only admit fault after a huge amount of pressure

 

[Silent_Buddha]

They did a really low dirty thing when they released the firmware fix. They kept the same firmware version numbers. Now no one can tell if they have the fixed firmware version or not other than to do a firmware flash. When it's done, you still have no real confirmed way of knowing the flash was successful other than trying to duplicate the issue.

I attribute the not changing the firmware version number directly to being a dirty, evil and underhanded company for trying to sweep the issue under the rug before anyone notices. Shame on you Samsung!

Yup I don't like that they did that which is the only reason I haven't bought one yet. I figure I'll let all the drives with the pre-fix firmware clear the channel before picking one up to try out as I start to plan an upgrade to my WHS v1 machine. I believe only Samsung and WD have 667 GB platters and WHS v1 doesn't like the advanced format of EARS line of WD drives and I don't want to do the whole jumpering thing.

Still really tempted by the Samsung drive right now as they are going for 80 USD on Newegg right now.

Regards,
SB

 

[Mize]

The first priority of any publicly traded company is to maximize the benefit to their shareholders. This, in the US, is almost universally summed up as "maximize share price." All actions taken are weighted first and foremost against the impact on share price. If sweeping it under a rug will serve that purpose then all companies, Intel included, will do so. To think otherwise is naive.

 

[Sxotty]

No, I owned one. The nvidia chipsets were pretty notorious for data corruption issues that spanned numerous generations (NF2/NF4/NF790/etc).

Not really. The only problems I remember were with their drivers. If you used the windows ones you were clear, and the scale of the problem is just hearsay to begin with. I know my Nf2 was orders of magnitude more stable than my intel chipsets I got later.


Mize!! Wisdom again. I try to tell people that over and over, but no one seems to believe it.

 

[gongo]

NF2 Ultra is still nvidia best chipset (many thanks to Xbox Project?)....Soundstorm ... but it did died on me...my only chipset death...lol...my PC just failed to boot all the sudden.

I dont see the point of Nvidia chipset today...when the most performance tuning they can get out is the i/o controllers?

 

[Mize]

I have a dual Opteron server at the office running an nV chipset with no issues since 2005. I also had good luck with nV chipsets in my Athlon overclocking days, though I remember you had to be careful not to install certain nV drivers...can't remember which, but I know there was common wisdom to install the provided drivers one at a time skipping one (SATA?) because it would lead to data corruption.

 

[Sxotty]

I have a dual Opteron server at the office running an nV chipset with no issues since 2005. I also had good luck with nV chipsets in my Athlon overclocking days, though I remember you had to be careful not to install certain nV drivers...can't remember which, but I know there was common wisdom to install the provided drivers one at a time skipping one (SATA?) because it would lead to data corruption.

The storage driver said something like "are you sure you want to install this part there is a risk of data loss" and I said yes at first without data loss, but later said no since I did not see the advantage of using their drivers anyway.

 

[swaaye]

So I'm going to guess that the primary reason Intel bothered with this recall is to protect partner relationships? I'm not sure there was much risk of end users figuring it out when a small number of early boards start having SATA die after several years...

The storage driver said something like "are you sure you want to install this part there is a risk of data loss" and I said yes at first without data loss, but later said no since I did not see the advantage of using their drivers anyway.

Yup it was the storage driver. It didn't agree with some drives.

 

[swaaye]

Again apart from intel what companies are you referring too, they all try to sweep the issue under the carpet and only admit fault after a huge amount of pressure

I think that might be human nature.

But really AMD and Intel seem to be on top of their serious errata. Another one that comes to mind is how Toyota seemed quick to admit that their cars had defects in some controls.

That NVIDIA debacle might be the worst cover up in recent memory. My sister went through about 4 7900M GS replacements and Dell ended up just giving her a new notebook model. I also have a friend with a 7900M GTX that died from artifacting. That seems to me like a high failure rate. No experience with GF8M failures tho.

Actually ATI's GDDR5 issues have been annoying and they never admitted anything. Occasionally their cards and notebook products using GDDR5, from 4870 to Juniper AFAIK, occasionally had memory corruption. It may be related to GDDR5 manufacturer, video BIOS, and something in the drivers but it's not clear. There are some huge threads on some forums discussing this.

 

[Mize]

So I'm going to guess that the primary reason Intel bothered with this recall is to protect partner relationships? I'm not sure there was much risk of end users figuring it out when a small number of early boards start having SATA die after several years...

I have to guess the problem is much worse than they've said. From what I've read it must be a very thin metal trace that is going to die prematurely from electromigration or some such, but the 5-15% in 3 years, as you've noted, wouldn't explain the recall.