What you should know about Sandy Bridge

For my Gateway brethren contemplating a new lappy.

Sandy Bridge link

The problem is how are you going to know if you got the new chip or the old chip?

 

For those that may have already bought a new computer: ASUS and Gigabyte say-

"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."

 

Most manufacturers, if Intel's money supports it, would like to handle this as refunds. This is alot less work for the OEM that way and more profitable as there would possibly be a second sale..............

 

This just in:

"After causing chaos among motherboard makers by revealing a flaw in its 6-series motherboard chipsets, Intel has announced plans to recommence shipments of the faulty silicon, before the fixed chips have even started shipping. Intel claims it decided to start reshipping the chipsets after lengthy discussions with computer manufacturers. "As a result of these discussions and specific requests from computer makers,' says the company, 'Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel 6-series chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue." The announcement follows Intel's recent exposure of a well publicised design fault that affects the 3Gbps SATA ports (typically ports 2 to 5) in Intel's P67 and H67 chipsets. As such, we assume that the new systems based on the faulty chipsets will either come with a separate SATA controller card, or that they will only use the two (unaffected) 6Gbps SATA ports provided by the chipset."

So be careful what you buy and be sure which chip you have obtained.(What a Cluster ____K!)

 

And with Intel basically saying, "What the hell, we are shipping anyway" comes this:

LINK

Its bad enough the problems we have to sort through when we buy our computers, now we have to be vigilant about this error.

 

If you look that the average consumer, the vast majority will not experience or not notice the impact this flaw has for the duration and purpose of their computer use.

No worse than what apple does.