Intel Sandbagging: Cougar Point failures != 5-15% after 3 years???

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Stereodude

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So, color me skeptical about the whole 5-15% failure rate after 3 years that Intel professed for the Cougar Point chipset. I have a Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3P motherboard. I bought it 1/27/2011 and as of 4/27/2011 all 4 SATA-II (3Gbs) ports are basically dead.

The system was not heavily used. It was not a primary use machine. It was used basically for video compression. Further, up until 4/15 the SATA-II (3Gbs) ports were only used for optical drives (burning some discs). There was a SSD and SATA HD on the SATA-III (6Gbs ports) from the beginning. On 4/15 I received 5 Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723020BLA642 2TB 7200 RPM HD and decided to full format each of them (one at a time) using one of the SATA-II ports. After finding out that 2 of the 5 were bad (one has 224kB of bad sectors another does the whir click / whir click / whir click routine after attempting to format it) I decided to leave one of the good 7K3000's connected to use it a little (doing x264 video compression) to see if the HD would fail. And, voila! twelve days after first connecting a HD to the controller the SATA-II ports are effectively dead.

I realize there's a recall and I can get the motherboard replaced and I fully intend to do so, but this should be a cautionary tale to anyone thinking they can use their board without concern ignoring the recall.
 
I don't think "sandbagging" means what you think it does.

If Intel had 1% failure rate, while claiming a 5-15% rate, then the usage would be correct.
 
TechPirate said:
Congrats, you now make up part of that 5-15%.
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Well, if light usage can kill the controller in 3 months after the motherboard comes out of box, with only 12 days of real usage I don't think the failure rate can realistically be 5-15% after 3 years.
 
Stereodude said:
So, color me skeptical about the whole 5-15% failure rate after 3 years that Intel professed for the Cougar Point chipset. I have a Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3P motherboard. I bought it 1/27/2011 and as of 4/27/2011 all 4 SATA-II (3Gbs) ports are basically dead.
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With a sample size of one, how can you form any opinion on the validity of the 5-15% failure rate? Since you only had one, you technically have a personal failure rate of 100%, that doesn't mean Intel's failure rate is 100% :p
 
Over the course of 3 years, not necessarily after 3 years. Your personal experience may be a worst case example, even considering light usage.

I'd be interested to know how many people on [H] have remained with their B2 boards and how they are faring in comparison.
 
punisher said:
I don't think "sandbagging" means what you think it does.

If Intel had 1% failure rate, while claiming a 5-15% rate, then the usage would be correct.
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Uh... Sandbagging is intentionally misleading someone to gain an advantage via deception. In this case it's my opinion that Intel may have intentionally understated the failure rate of the bug to minimize the impact the their recall announcement on their stock price.
 
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Neb said:
With a sample size of one, how can you form any opinion on the validity of the 5-15% failure rate? Since you only had one, you technically have a personal failure rate of 100%, that doesn't mean Intel's failure rate is 100% :p
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I realize that. Hence why I started the thread with my opinion followed by some question marks indicating some uncertainty to see if other people have seen failures.

I am not stating absolutely that the failure rate is not 5-15% over 3 years. I'm just skeptical of the claim given my own experiences.
 
With the angry face icon and the three question marks in the topic, it seemed to me as if you were accusing Intel, not asking for opinions and input from others. Just IMO, of course.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I'm just not seeing the logic behind your skepticism of the claim, since your own experience is based on only one instance. If I receive a hard drive and it dies within the first week of usage, I don't instantly assume that the entire model or even the entire brand of hard drive is faulty (though that seems to be a common assumption made by some).
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
lol I guess the OP decided to just chance it and not replace his board?
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:rolleyes: No, the OP was waiting for Microcenter to get replacement boards in and wasn't in a huge hurry. Since Microcenter gave us until May 15th to return the board for replacement or in store credit and the Z68 chipset comes out May 8th getting a Z68 instead may be a better option. Had the OP been in a hurry to be one of the first people on the internet with a B3 P67 chipset a Z68 "upgrade" would be out of the question.
 
Stereodude said:
So, color me skeptical about the whole 5-15% failure rate after 3 years that Intel professed for the Cougar Point chipset. I have a Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3P motherboard. I bought it 1/27/2011 and as of 4/27/2011 all 4 SATA-II (3Gbs) ports are basically dead.

The system was not heavily used. It was not a primary use machine. It was used basically for video compression. Further, up until 4/15 the SATA-II (3Gbs) ports were only used for optical drives (burning some discs). There was a SSD and SATA HD on the SATA-III (6Gbs ports) from the beginning. On 4/15 I received 5 Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723020BLA642 2TB 7200 RPM HD and decided to full format each of them (one at a time) using one of the SATA-II ports. After finding out that 2 of the 5 were bad (one has 224kB of bad sectors another does the whir click / whir click / whir click routine after attempting to format it) I decided to leave one of the good 7K3000's connected to use it a little (doing x264 video compression) to see if the HD would fail. And, voila! twelve days after first connecting a HD to the controller the SATA-II ports are effectively dead.

I realize there's a recall and I can get the motherboard replaced and I fully intend to do so, but this should be a cautionary tale to anyone thinking they can use their board without concern ignoring the recall.
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Why didn't you follow the advice of others arond here and lower the PCH voltage?
I had my PCH running at 1.0v slightly undervolted, and I had four drives running on the four 3g ports, with the computer running 24/7, until RMA'ing the board in the middle of March. So about two months of 24/7 usage. Some even ran it as low as 0.950v.

As far as I've seen, not a single person who undervolted had the ports die.
 
Stereodude said:
:rolleyes: No, the OP was waiting for Microcenter to get replacement boards in and wasn't in a huge hurry. Since Microcenter gave us until May 15th to return the board for replacement or in store credit and the Z68 chipset comes out May 8th getting a Z68 instead may be a better option. Had the OP been in a hurry to be one of the first people on the internet with a B3 P67 chipset a Z68 "upgrade" would be out of the question.
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Ah, so you were trying to game the system by holding onto a bad board and ended up with a bunch of dead SATA ports? Makes sense now :p
 
Stereodude said:
:rolleyes: No, the OP was waiting for Microcenter to get replacement boards in and wasn't in a huge hurry. Since Microcenter gave us until May 15th to return the board for replacement or in store credit and the Z68 chipset comes out May 8th getting a Z68 instead may be a better option. Had the OP been in a hurry to be one of the first people on the internet with a B3 P67 chipset a Z68 "upgrade" would be out of the question.
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so basically, you said the OP wants more than he paid for. Well... too bad, lol.
 
Yeah my original p67 acted bad from the get go, corrupted windows installs and stuff, slowly the ports started going. By the time I was ready for B3 at least 3 of the ports were fucked. This WAS a bad recall issue, glad intel fixed it up fucking good. I have a B3 now it works perfect.
 
Intel recalled the boards for a reason, they had an issue that was not ok. Its common sense that the board with this issue will break, and it doesn't have to be after 3 years it can be before. Next time a manufacturer does a major recall, heed it and get your free replacement right away so you won't have issues later.
 
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Stereodude said:
Uh... Sandbagging is intentionally misleading someone to gain an advantage via deception. In this case it's my opinion that Intel may have intentionally understated the failure rate of the bug to minimize the impact the their recall announcement on their stock price.
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I don't think taking a charge of $1 billion and describing it as the worst hardware bug they've ever had could be described as "understated".
 
got my bored used off the forums and have been using it since the day it showed up havent even shut my pc down and all 4 of my drives still work. like said above your board was the 5-15% that failed
 
Hey, just wondering you said it killed all your sata ports. Did it kill your hard drives? I mean if you got 5 drives, and 2 was bad, or came in bad? Or did the 2 come bad after connecting to the Sata 2 ports. I know you said you had 1 left in their and it died in 12 days. Was that just the port of the Hard Drive too. I havent kept word about but I am thinking of upgrading to sandybridge, and knowing this information is valuable. Thanks!
 
KrAzYaZnFLiP808 said:
Hey, just wondering you said it killed all your sata ports. Did it kill your hard drives? I mean if you got 5 drives, and 2 was bad, or came in bad? Or did the 2 come bad after connecting to the Sata 2 ports. I know you said you had 1 left in their and it died in 12 days. Was that just the port of the Hard Drive too. I havent kept word about but I am thinking of upgrading to sandybridge, and knowing this information is valuable. Thanks!
Click to expand...

The issue does no harm to whatever is plugged into the ports. A layer of stuff that connects the ports to the motherboard deteriorates in such a way that the ports increasingly become unable to transmit or receive to the hard drive; the signal gets weaker and weaker. This does not damage the hard drive, but the hard drive gets slower and slower as more data packets have to be retransmitted because they were lost.

All of the motherboards on the legit retail market have fixed this problem. Look for "B3" somewhere and that tells you it's the new fixed chipset. I would NOT buy a Sandy Bridge motherboard on eBay at this time (or anytime in the future to be honest); I'm sure it's flooded with B2s being sold as B3s.
 
Im using a GA-P67A-UD5 B2 board

Using 2 SATA II ports 1 DVD Drive 1 HDD
And that HDD is my WIndows 7 HDD for now. Im guessing thats no light use and everything works fine so far... but its only been 2 months or so

Cant be bothered to exchange it or whatever
 
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Stereodude said:
I realize that. Hence why I started the thread with my opinion followed by some question marks indicating some uncertainty to see if other people have seen failures.

I am not stating absolutely that the failure rate is not 5-15% over 3 years. I'm just skeptical of the claim given my own experiences.
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You may not completely get what they were saying. They meant 5 to 15% will fail within 3 years. That means today or two years from now, not after 3 years of usage, or shorter if used often. And even then numbers can change. Look at Dell and the bad caps. At first they thought 12%, then 45% rising up to 97% before it leveled off to 22% Just bad luck.
 
KrAzYaZnFLiP808 said:
Hey, just wondering you said it killed all your sata ports. Did it kill your hard drives? I mean if you got 5 drives, and 2 was bad, or came in bad? Or did the 2 come bad after connecting to the Sata 2 ports. I know you said you had 1 left in their and it died in 12 days. Was that just the port of the Hard Drive too. I havent kept word about but I am thinking of upgrading to sandybridge, and knowing this information is valuable. Thanks!
Click to expand...
No drives were killed by the ports. I had 2 bad drives basically out of the box courtesy of Hitachi's terrible quality control and sloppy manufacturing tolerances.
 
Stereodude said:
Uh... Sandbagging is intentionally misleading someone to gain an advantage via deception. In this case it's my opinion that Intel may have intentionally understated the failure rate of the bug to minimize the impact the their recall announcement on their stock price.
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Incorrect. Sandbagging is intentionally downplaying your true potential to gain an advantage over the competition. There is no advantage in having a defect in your product. Whether the true failure rate is 1% or 90%, it only serves to hurt Intel. Your usage of the term makes absolutely no sense.
 
Grrag275 said:
Im using a GA-P67A-UD5 B2 board

Using 2 SATA II ports 1 DVD Drive 1 HDD
And that HDD is my WIndows 7 HDD for now. Im guessing thats no light use and everything works fine so far... but its only been 2 months or so

Cant be bothered to exchange it or whatever
Click to expand...

This I don't understand. Gigabyte has a really easy process.

I did a B2 to B3 RMA. You put down a deposit, they send you a new motherboard via UPS 3-day. You swap it out, and there's a prepaid UPS 3-day return label, and you send it back, then your deposit is refunded. It is a process that took like two quick e-mails and a short walk to the post office. I had about two hours of downtime, and that was because I was switching cases at the same time. Otherwise, it would have been about 30 minutes. My retailer (Provantage) was worse than useless, did not respond to any e-mails, but going directly through gigabyte was very painless, and didn't even need a proof of purchase or anything, just the serial number from the box.
 
nalc said:
This I don't understand. Gigabyte has a really easy process.

I did a B2 to B3 RMA. You put down a deposit, they send you a new motherboard via UPS 3-day. You swap it out, and there's a prepaid UPS 3-day return label, and you send it back, then your deposit is refunded. It is a process that took like two quick e-mails and a short walk to the post office. I had about two hours of downtime, and that was because I was switching cases at the same time. Otherwise, it would have been about 30 minutes. My retailer (Provantage) was worse than useless, did not respond to any e-mails, but going directly through gigabyte was very painless, and didn't even need a proof of purchase or anything, just the serial number from the box.
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I might just do it then. I thought id have to stay without a motherboard for at least a week... plus everything works just fine so i didnt bother checking.
 
Stereodude said:
So, color me skeptical about the whole 5-15% failure rate after 3 years that Intel professed for the Cougar Point chipset. I have a Gigabyte GA-P67-UD3P motherboard. I bought it 1/27/2011 and as of 4/27/2011 all 4 SATA-II (3Gbs) ports are basically dead.
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You don't understand how failure rates work. Example: a part with a 10,000 hour MTBF rate can possibly fail after 1 hour. ;)
 
Toaster Oven said:
Incorrect. Sandbagging is intentionally downplaying your true potential to gain an advantage over the competition. There is no advantage in having a defect in your product. Whether the true failure rate is 1% or 90%, it only serves to hurt Intel. Your usage of the term makes absolutely no sense.
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In the future perhaps it would serve you well to consult a dictionary before criticizing someone else and their use of the English language lest you let everyone know you're the one who doesn't know the definition of the word.

From Merriam-Webster. "sandbag: (intransitive verb) to hide the truth about oneself so as to gain an advantage over another."

My usage makes perfect sense. I think it's possible that Intel was hiding the truth about the likelihood of a failure to keep the markets calm (ie: maintain an advantage over AMD).
 
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pxc said:
You don't understand how failure rates work. Example: a part with a 10,000 hour MTBF rate can possibly fail after 1 hour. ;)
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I know precisely what a Mean Time Between Failure is. It's the average time between failures. In your example, it means that the average time between failures for a statistically significant group of products will be 10,000 hours.

However, this is a moot discussion since Intel has not given a MTBF or MTTF for the Cougar Point chipset. They only gave guidance in their financial notice of the estimated failure rate after 3 years.
 
Stereodude said:
In the future perhaps it would serve you well to consult a dictionary before criticizing someone else and their use of the English language lest you let everyone know you're the one who doesn't know the definition of the word.

From Merriam-Webster. "sandbag: (intransitive verb) to hide the truth about oneself so as to gain an advantage over another."

My usage makes perfect sense. I think it's possible that Intel was hiding the truth about the likelihood of a failure to keep the markets calm (ie: maintain an advantage over AMD).
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Actually HIS usage is correct. Yours would be the exact opposite of that.
 
Sandbagging the Sandy Bridge -- haha.

Anyway, I had a bug from the beginning, when first trying to burn a 4.5 GB image to a dvd via the SATA2 ports on a B2 Asus p8p67 pro. No way to get past 75%, but fine with the same burner on one of the Marvell ports. Also fine with my new B3 board, ASRock P67 Extreme6.

For a 10-15% failure rate after years, they would not have made that buzz.
 
Stereodude said:
In the future perhaps it would serve you well to consult a dictionary before criticizing someone else and their use of the English language lest you let everyone know you're the one who doesn't know the definition of the word.

From Merriam-Webster. "sandbag: (intransitive verb) to hide the truth about oneself so as to gain an advantage over another."

My usage makes perfect sense. I think it's possible that Intel was hiding the truth about the likelihood of a failure to keep the markets calm (ie: maintain an advantage over AMD).
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbagging

this should help you understand a bit more.
 
Yours broke, we get it. RMA. Enough whining.
 
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