Published in Transportation

Broken Sandy bridge boards still selling

by on04 February 2011
intel_insidenew_logo

No alternative till April
It looks like Intel Sandy Bridge sales of both desktop and notebook computers are going to be catastrophically bad in the short run. The reason is obvious, Intel has advised its partners to stop selling boards, but it also told them that the replacement chipset and boards wont come before April.

Usually when a company says that something comes in April, it usually mean the end of the month rather the the beginning so it can be almost three months without any fixed boards.

No boards, means no CPU sales as you kind of need something to plug a CPU to. Notebook sales is also being halted by all the major partners including HP, Dell, Samsung and probably everyone else.

Major retailer including Alternate in Germany have shut down the complete 1155 socket motherboard category, something you can see here.

Newegg did the same for the US, no boards with 1155 but daring Overclockers.co.uk is still selling them happily if you care to buy one you can do it here or here.

At Geizhals some 80 boards from Asrock, Asus, Biostar, Elitegroup, Foxconn, Gigabyte, MSI and funny enough Intel are still available at various shops, that are ready to sell you a socket 1155 board. You can get them here.

To Intel's defence, the problem is not so dramatic to kill the Sandy Bridge momentum completely. As you might know, SATA 3 ports on affected chipset work just fine, and only SATA 2 slots might give up on you, and it can take up to three years before it happens. The real hassle is to replace a board and live without a motherboard for a few days especially if you got it online rather than in a local shop.

You will most likely have to send your board, before you get a replacement one which leaves you without a PC for at least a few days to a week, talking about best case scenario here. The ones that got their boards locally will most likely swap its bad board for a new one, but no one will get rewarded you for an effort of taking the board out and putting a new one in.

The exact replacement procedure is yet to be announced, but it won't happen before April. Intel and its motherboard partners said that April is the time for new boards. No boards available means a very weak CPU sales numbers and very weak financial quarter for Intel. The problem will affect Intel in Q1, part of Q2 and probably will drag on for the most part of 2011.

This is at least good the “we don't need Dirk Meyer company” also known as AMD, as they might get some traction for their upcoming Bulldozer part, but AMD has to start shipping soon, before April would be great.

Just have in mind that Intel probably put everything on paper and has decided to rather halt the product and  lose billions then to face some saucy lawsuits in the future. The only big issue is that quite great CPU, Sandy Bridge, completely loses face due to this error. Anyone remembers Barcelona Phenom and what a simple errata bug can do to a product line, perhaps even the whole brand?

Last modified on 04 February 2011
Rate this item
(15 votes)