Intel did release Sandy Bridge and there was **A RECALL**

[adam_grif]

Can find plenty of 2500's but no 2500K's in Australia. If they don't start showing up on Staticice soon I'm going to be pretty pissed.

[Xon]

There are the 2600Ks(which are out of stock in most places listing them), but the australian release has been a little bizarre. From the looks of it, most of the stores in Australia are very much supply constrained. Several stores in Perth are basicly giving the same answer on when to expect more stock.

[adam_grif]

Already dropped some cash, got an Asus P8P67 with a 2500 processor sitting behind me right now.

Got our local PC store to call up suppliers, reportedly none of the suppliers in Australia are stocking 2500K's or even taking orders for them. ALL MY RAGE. Anyway, won't get to build the rest of the system for another 2 weeks though.

[Executor32]

Per my post in the "Rate my rig" thread, I'll be picking up a 2600K and an ASUS P8P67 as soon as my tax refund comes in. It'll be nice to have something up-to-date again, the E8400 is starting to show its age.

[xthetenth]

The thing that strikes me as the most awesome about Sandy Bridge is the pricing. I just took a quick look at newegg and I can get an i5 2500K with motherboard and 4 gigs ram for 360 dollars. That's a lot of upgrade for the price. That's even better than the core 2 duo awesomeness that I built my computer during and was basically in shock at what I could get.

[Dominus Atheos]

Aaaaaaannnnd they've been recalled. The motherboards anyway.

Intel has today announced that its 6-series chipset, for use with the Sandy Bridge processors released earlier this year, has a serious flaw and that the company is recalling and replacing the affected parts. The chipsets, which provide PCI Express, USB, and other connectivity to the processor, have a problem in their SATA controllers causing performance to degrade over time.

In its statement, the company states that customers who have taken delivery of systems with the P67 and H67 "Cougar Point" chipsets can continue to use their systems "with confidence," suggesting that the flaw is restricted to a performance issue and cannot cause data loss. Nonetheless, such users should contact their computer manufacturers to obtain a fixed system.

The flawed chipsets are no longer shipping from Intel, and the company has already started manufacturing corrected versions. These will reach customers by the end of February. Full production volume won't be achieved until April. Intel estimates that the full financial cost of the error will be around $700 million, with $300 million of that incurred during the first quarter due to the production interruption. The company has adjusted its investor guidance accordingly.

[White Haven]

Ah hell. Thanks for the heads-up, Dominus, I've got some of those in stock here at the shop, so definitely good to know.

[xthetenth]

It apparently can get really nasty, bad enough that the errors can possibly be enough to effectively disconnect the drive. It's SATA 3Gbps only, the 6 Gbps seems unaffected, so if you have less than two drives on SATA you can just use the 6 Gbps for now.
Anandtech's got an article up about it:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/inte ... ins-recall

[Dalton]

Modified the thread title to reflect the latest news.

[adam_grif]

Just set up my new rig today, using a P67 chipset.

SIGH.

I won't bother sending it back unless something bad actually happens though. If what they're saying about 6gps is true I'll just hook it up to that and be done with it, I'm only using one HDD.

[Vympel]

Assembling parts for new PC literally started yesterday. Then this bullshit news comes out. *sigh*

Might as well wait for Z68 now. Fuck's sake ...

[xthetenth]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the- ... t-sata-bug

The source has been found.

The most relevant bit about it is:

The problem in the chipset was traced back to a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The aforementioned transistor has a very thin gate oxide, which allows you to turn it on with a very low voltage. Unfortunately in this case Intel biased the transistor with too high of a voltage, resulting in higher than expected leakage current. Depending on the physical characteristics of the transistor the leakage current here can increase over time which can ultimately result in this failure on the 3Gbps ports. The fact that the 3Gbps and 6Gbps circuits have their own independent clocking trees is what ensures that this problem is limited to only ports 2 - 5 off the controller.

So the 6gbps is good and it's a relatively long-term error so you shouldn't see anything from it immediately.

[White Haven]

In other words, stop stressing, build, you won't see the problem anytime soon, and then take advantage of the Intel recall when they get it organized. Drama: Averted.

[xthetenth]

In other words, stop stressing, build, you won't see the problem anytime soon, and then take advantage of the Intel recall when they get it organized. Drama: Averted.

Intel is handling this really well, but I think I'll just use it as an excuse to wait and see what the Z68 looks like because I don't want the hassle of having to switch it out again twice. It was annoying enough when I was stepping up from an 8600 GTS to an 8800 GT, but not getting any performance upgrade out of it just seems like a needless hassle. If the Z68 looks good I think I may get that one just because I want to run an SSD at some point and the features for mixing the two sound really cool.

[Vympel]

Exactly. I'm not buying a defective chipset that I'll have to replace in some sort of annoying recall program when I can just wait for a fixed or superior model.