Official maingear response on intel cougar point chipset issue

[ChrisMorley]

Today we were made aware of an issue with Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform, Cougar Point. This issue relates to the chips used in all P67 and H67 motherboards compatible with Sandy Bridge processors, but it does NOT affect the Sandy Bridge processor itself.

It should be emphasized that MAINGEAR has over one man year of testing and validation invested in Sandy Bridge and we have not seen one instance of this issue in any test platform or customer system. Furthermore, we were just made aware of this issue this morning by Intel, and NOBODY, not a single motherboard partner, OEM, or integrator has had any information on this prior to today.

The issue resides specifically with the hard drive controller in the chips for controllers ports 2-5, the SATA 3G ports. It does NOT affect the SATA 6G ports, or ports 0 and 1. It’s an aging issue, not a critical hardware failure, and as such will not be seen by the majority of our customers. It is also not an issue where the customer’s data will be at risk. It is merely a performance degradation over time issue.

Customers who have a system today should not worry and may continue to use their system. When we have our replacement motherboards in March, we will pay shipping back and forth and of course cover the labor costs associated with swapping out the motherboard. All current Sandy Bridge customers will have their motherboard warranty extended to 3 years from the date of purchase as well, covering the new motherboard.

Alternatively, customers who have a Sandy Bridge system but do not want to send it back in, and customers who have yet to have their system ship but want it to ship immediately are eligible to receive, at no charge, a SATA 3G discrete hard drive controller so they may be able to expand their storage as needed without utilizing the affected SATA ports 2-5.

Customers who have yet to receive their system may alternatively call in to have their order halted until we get replacement motherboards in March.

MAINGEAR will have more information as the situation develops.

[Vizier]

Gotta wonder who took the coffee break at Intel's Quality Control to let this slip by.

[Nawset]

How would you like to handle new orders? Should we wait to place until March or would you rather have lead time to amass other components in advance. I am assuming no build occurs until after the mobo is available.

[ChrisMorley]

We are going to adjust leadtimes accordingly, we are still developing further strategies going forward.

[wastedyouth]

I worked at a local grocery store as a teenager. One night I left the water hose running in the storeroom and flooded the whole store. Yeah, I got fired, I was ashamed, and it's one of the low points in my life. I bet the poor guy at Intel who let this one slip by wishes he was me right now. I rule!

On another note, my X-Cube is scheduled to arrive Wednesday. I've got an SSD on the 6G port, and I've got it configured with a second hard drive and a BD-ROM. Am I correct in guessing that I'm either ok or able to made ok by using the 0 and 1 ports for those two devices? I've got it with SLI, so I'm guessing that kills my chances of using a separate controller card. Thanks.

[Vizier]

I had my order halted until the new boards come in. Sure, a third party controller is nice, but if I have to ship it back in a month's time anyways, I might as well just wait.

I may not be happy I won't see the results of my payment until March, but at least I'm guaranteed a product that works.

[ChrisMorley]

I worked at a local grocery store as a teenager. One night I left the water hose running in the storeroom and flooded the whole store. Yeah, I got fired, I was ashamed, and it's one of the low points in my life. I bet the poor guy at Intel who let this one slip by wishes he was me right now. I rule!

On another note, my X-Cube is scheduled to arrive Wednesday. I've got an SSD on the 6G port, and I've got it configured with a second hard drive and a BD-ROM. Am I correct in guessing that I'm either ok or able to made ok by using the 0 and 1 ports for those two devices? I've got it with SLI, so I'm guessing that kills my chances of using a separate controller card. Thanks.

Yes, you'll be unaffected. If you want, we can hold your shipment until we get new boards in, your call. Just please email sales if you wish to make any changes.

[wastedyouth]

Thanks, Chris. I think I'll just let it ride for right now. BTW, if this is any indication of how you guys handle support, my Maingear is going to be a dream. When I read about the chip flaws at Kotaku earlier, I was like, "Oh $#%." But then I read your official response and was like "meh, no big deal." Maingear is really making this easy any way you want to slice it. Thanks.

[arail]

Maybe you could provide an explanation of what this means for those of us who don't necessarily know what SATA is (or SLI or SSD or much else beyond the terms CPU and 'video card'). A brief explanation of what parts of our computers this affects would be helpful. My Vybe is shipping today (so excited I'm afraid my head is going to burst!) so I imagine I'll be affected but I have no idea how or to what extent.

Thanks for any info you can provide (now I have to go back to looking out the window waiting for the UPS truck)

[james_k_p]

This is a bummer. I've been waiting 3 weeks for my system and it's supposed to ship TODAY. LOL

Oh the irony.

I can't wait another month, so I'll enjoy it whenever it comes in and ship it back when the replacement boards are back. I'm guessing the repair will be done quite quickly?

[Nawset]

Hopefully this is a covered loss under the business interruption coverage on your BOP policy or you will be able to recoup losses from Intel. I am assuming that this isn't a happy day at the shop. I feel petty asking how this will affect me.

[ChrisMorley]

Intel is a great partner and we have full faith in their ability to rectify this situation. Furthermore we are committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience and together with Intel we intend to do just that.

James, call in to sales, we want to talk to you before we ship to give you options.

[CheapAsianGamerGuy]

Basically, the simplified explanation is that there are 2 disk drive controllers on the P67/H67 motherboards, controlling a total of 6 "SATA" disk drive ports (usable for Hard Drives, Solid State Drives, and CD/DVD Drives).

2 of the ports are higher speed SATA-III (6 Gigabit/second) and are unaffected by this issue.

4 of the ports are on lower speed SATA-II (3 Gigabit/second) and will slowly degrade over time. Degrade in this case being defined as "will show data transfer error and retry, resulting in longer and longer data access times, until eventually the drive on the controller will drop off as a detected device". The DRIVES themselves are not damaged, they can be installed and recognized and used as normal if shifted to a working controller/port.

The fault appears to happen in 5-15% of the affected motherboards (depending on usage) over a 1-3 year period. Or much more often as is being reported by RAID users (where the drives are strung together to make one virtual drive, with a much higher read/write activity quotient).

Official response from various PC vendors has been "Keep using your system, move to a SATA-III port if you can, and once the supply chain catches up around about April, return your motherboard for an exchange".

Unless you're a heavy data I/O user, RAID user, this issue is unlikely to affect you at all in the short term.

(Disclaimer, I am not a Maingear, Intel, Newegg, or other retailer employee, I'm a volunteer tech over at the Newegg customer tech support forums)

[DaveH]

The computer I ordered had one SSD, one hard drive, and then one DVD drive. I am assuming that the SSD and hard drive would be unaffected by this problem, since you'd hook those up to the 6gb/s ports. If the DVD drive is hooked up to one of the defective ports is it even going to be an issue I'd notice? I'm trying to understand how concerned I should even be about this issue.

[arail]

Thanks for the helpful reply CheapAsianGamerGuy.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, a computer that has one HD and one optical drive wouldn't be affected?

[ChrisMorley]

If you have one or two hard drives you'll never seen an issue. An optical on ports 2-5 will likely never see the issue during the life of the system due to low usage compared to a hard drive.

[ajumepke]

I think my Xcube is in the same situation as DaveH.

Anandtech goes further into this issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-cougar-point-sata-bug

[CheapAsianGamerGuy]

Thanks for the helpful reply CheapAsianGamerGuy.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, a computer that has one HD and one optical drive wouldn't be affected?

Make sure the drives are plugged into/using the SATA-III 6Gbps ports, and yeah, you will never encounter this issue.

Edit:
There's a very strong knee-jerk return trend being observed in the field, that's why I'm trying to stress that the average user/owner will not certainly encounter this issue during a normal PC service lifetime. This is NOT a formal recall of all parts, but pc part vendors are generally honoring returns in good faith because there are no current parts in the pipeline that are free of this issue. If you have some patience, some technical common sense, and not a little bit of faith, you can make sure you are unaffected by this issue in the short term - and in the long term, all will be made good. Yeah it's a hassle, yeah nobody likes it, but if you have a working system, it's not going to just magically go poof and die on you overnight. You WILL see speed degradation over time as a symptom. You CAN switch ports to work around the issue (a $25 PCIE SATA controller works pretty well too). This is by no means a fatally flawed platform.

[arail]

Thanks again CheapAsianGamerGuy -

This is precisely why I asked for clarification. I have no interest in sending my rig back and wasting Maingear's time if I'm not going to be materially affected by the flaw.

Unless of course, Maingear is adequately compensated by Intel for the replacement work, then we should all ship them back.

[ace4209]

Not a good day for Maingear or its future customers like myself. It really doesn't affect me since I was going to wait until March/April timeframe to buy a shift. Whom ever was in charge at Intel is not going to have a good week, I read that it was going to cost Intel $700 million dollars to fix this issue.

[Vizier]

Not a good day for Maingear or its future customers like myself. It really doesn't affect me since I was going to wait until March/April timeframe to buy a shift. Whom ever was in charge at Intel is not going to have a good week, I read that it was going to cost Intel $700 million dollars to fix this issue.

Correction: It will cost an initial 300 million to do recalls, and another 700 million to redesign the current chips to working standards. Overall, Intel is taking a 1 billion dollar hit due to this oversight. This also effects all the PC boutiques and distributors for the sandy bridge chips and motherboards. Trust me when I say NOBODY is happy right now.

Except AMD fans. They're rejoicing.

[Robert_Dunn]

Thank you for the way you have handled this unfortunate development, Mr. Morley. MAINGEAR's admirable corporate philosophy will continue to endear you to your customers, as demonstrated by your early and effective plan of corrective action on this Cougar Point chipset issue. I've requested my Shift S held pending further developments. It WAS due to ship today, Feb. 1st. You have my gratitude and my respect.

[ChrisMorley]

Thanks for everyone's support! This is a very trying time for us but it's refreshing to have the support of our customers!

[Setre]

I've only got one HDD in my Vybe and will probably only put an SSD in it when the prices for them go down. So I'm not too worried about this. My Vybe is scheduled to ship Thursday and I've tried calling Sales but it's busy (no surprise) so I'll try again later and tomorrow.

Thanks for the heads up about this Chris.

[james_k_p]

I'm still getting my Shift SS sent and I'll play with it for a month then ship it back for a little bit to have the board replaced when they have the parts. No biggie here. I'll keep all the boxes and shipping materials to send it back with.

The only issue for me is I'll I have to wait to put in a pair of Raptor drives (already own) I planned putting in a Raid 0 on that controller. It was going to be my main game/app drive to install to, but the pair of ssd 128gigs coming with it with tide me over just fine :).

So I'm VERY glad Intel found this now as this will directly impact me...or would have :). Thanks for taking my call directly yesterday, Chris. It was nice to talk to you.

Sincerely,
James

[ChrisMorley]

Some clarification and update: if you choose the discrete PCI-E controller we will not pay for shipping back to MAINGEAR for the swapout, but the swapout will be done free of charge when it comes to labor.

Also, we have worked with Asus to resume shipments of Sandy Bridge systems with the SATA II ports disabled or not used. We will be including a discrete controller in these new designs. More info will come soon...

[Nawset]

Chris,

Do we have the option of going with a discrete SATA controller with a defective Intel motherboard or are you recommending/requiring us to wait until the new boards are available? If it is an option, what are the drawbacks (other than losing the availability of a PCI slot)?

Pete

[ChrisMorley]

Yes you have that option - either waiting or going with a discrete controller. They drawback really is just losing a slot.

[Nawset]

Just to beat a dead horse a tiny bit more. Could an argument be made that a discrete controller could be advantageous if one planned to raid drives connected to it, as it provides some level of flexibility with future upgrades? With a disscrete card, future motherboard swaps would be faster as one could transfer over the controller and not have to rebuild the array? Just trying to learn a little here.

[ChrisMorley]

Actually, yes, that could be one ADVANTAGE to the card - easily transferred RAID arrays from one platform to the next...

[james_k_p]

Any update on the new motherboards?

[Nawset]

Yeah, would love to know when I will be receiving my "your build has been kitted" email. One month and I am getting antsy.

[ChrisMorley]

Really, really soon. Intel branded boards may hit as early as next week, Gigabyte and Asus will come very shortly after that.

[james_k_p]

Hiya again,

Just got back from vacation and would like to have my Shift's MB replaced soon. Any update?
It's killing me to add some big drives for movies/etc in it.

James