X58 Angry Rant

[Keltoi]

I recently bought a Gigabyte UD5. The board lasted 2 days before it was RMAed. It repeatedly failed to detect the hard drive and I was unable to boot into windows. Gigabyte still have not replied to my e-mail, but that no longer upsets me as I have returned their defective merchandise. I would not recommend this board to anyone. However, browsing through posts in forumson various web sites, it appears that serious problems have arisen with the boards produced by each and every manufacturer. This leads me to draw a number of conclusions:

1) The companies are not carrying out adequate quality control.
2) The reviews on sites such as this one are meaningless. You may learn how well a board overclocks, but issues of reliability and shoddy manufacturing will be conveniently ignored. Either sites such as Tom's, and the issue is by no means isolated to this site, are receiving cherry picked models for their "reviews" or they are failing to report on the issues that end users are likely to encounter. The so-called hardware "reviews" amount to little more than publicity for the major manufacturers.
3) We should expect more, both from the reviews and from the manufacturers themselves. It is not enough to say that new hardware always causes headaches: we should not be willing to accept that merchandise does not work as advertised out of the box, especially when cost is considered. This may mean that we have to wait longer for proper reviews and for product releases, but I would be willing to wait longer for companies to release products and more comprehensive reviews if this meant that I was less likely to receive substandard hardware. Companies and reviewers should extend deadlines and give us all a break.
4) As a community, we need to focus less on a products ability to overclock and more on the quality of the harware in question.


My five cents. End of rant

 

[rescawen]

if this is real ill stick with msi or evga or maybe asus

 

[Keltoi]

This is very real and if I have discouraged you from purchasing from Gigabyte I think I have done you a favour. However, my main point is, if you look at the posts on several forums, Asus, MSi and EVGA et. al are all having similar problems, none of the major manufactures seem capable of producing boards that do not require several subsequent bios updates and even then there is no guarantee that everything will work as it should. This simply is not good enough. Time for a console?

 

[SpinachEater]

Welcome to the forums Keltoi. I hope you stick around and didn't just stop by to file a complaint.

First I have to say, I own a Gigabyte board and recently had to RMA it for a bad BIOS flash (100% my fault). It took roughly a week for them to respond to my issue but they granted the RMA with no questions asked. I sent the board in the weekend before Christmas and got it back the 3rd week of January which is much much sooner than when I thought I would get it back given it was over a major holiday.

My experience with Gigabyte has been 100% satisfactory. I have had my motherboard for almost a year and it has had no issues at all. It is also has a pretty good overclock on it to add to the stress and it still hasn't failed.

I am sorry to hear that you had issues with your motherboard and I would be angry too if there were problems with it right out of the box. However, this is a good example that you should really do some research before buying something. You are right, professional reviews really don't touch on reliability. You have to search through customer reviews to get that info. Sometimes good companies put out duds. Sometimes an entire product will have bugs and sometimes you just get unlucky and get the one bad motherboard in a batch. Live with it. It happens to everyone. If you look through every motherboard's customer reviews, someone has one that didn't work no matter what company it is from.

At least your problem happened soon enough where you were still covered by who ever you bought it from. If you are within your purchase agreement time frame you should just return the board to the store as defective and skip going to Gigabyte.

Did you make any attempt to troubleshoot or did you just assume your motherboard was dead? You may have just had a bad OS install or didn't set BIOS correctly. Did you read the manual before setting up your system? There are things you have to change in the BIOS for the hard drives before installing windows. In my Gigabyte manual there is a dedicated section called "Configuring SATA Hard Drives".

 

[Keltoi]

Hi SpinachEater,

I understand that good companies sometimes put out duds; however, I feel that the range of issues with the x58 boards produced by all companies is worthy of some comment: enough is enough, we are paying customers, not unpaid beta testers. I did research the board before purchase, but given that its such a new piece of equipment most of the information was harvested from the glowing reviews given by official review sites. I am willing to live with it, but I feel that others should know about the issue.

I have returned the board to the shop, not to Gigabyte, but I mailed Gigabyte early last week and still have not received a reply. Potential buyers should also be aware of a company's customer service, or lack thereof.

Troubleshooting:
I tried everything and I thoroughly read the manual before I even purchased the product. I went through the bios and changed every possible variable; updated the bios; installed Vista, or rather attempted to install Vista, over 20 times! Sometimes the hard drive appeared and sometimes it simply was not detected. Initially I was able to boot into Windows, but the problems appeared after about half an hour. Other forum users on various sites who have experienced similar issues have now emerged

Conclusions:
This board has bios issues that may or may not be fixed with future updates and is not ready for public release. This is not a personal attack against Gigabyte, but rather against the entire industry and the associated review processes in online expert sites. For instance, Asus have just release version 2 of their P6T, a board I'm considering as a replacement for the Gigabyte. However, this raises a number of questions: why was version 2 necessary? What issues occured with version 1? Does anybody actually believe that they simply removed the SAS because users stated that they did not require this feature?
Unfortunately, we seem to have arrived at a point where bios updates are seen as part of the entire building process: they shouldn't be, each product should be thoroughly tested before it gets to the client and updates and fixes should be the exception rather than the norm. Expert reviews should be carried out on retail boards obtained from the nearest dealer and official reviews should also provide coverage of problems encountered during set up. I personally don't care how well a board overclocks if I am unable to get it to detect a hard drive or boot into Windows. Until expert reviewers are willing/able to provide much more scathing reviews where a company fails to meet minimum standards (i.e. provide a product that works) then they become part of the problem rather than the solution. I think drastic changes in the review process are in order. However, given the revenue generated on all sides, I won't be holding my breath.

In any event, thanks for your suggestions.

 

[jaops]

Sorry you had problems. I couldn't agree more with what you said.

 

[MAR_IUS]

I had exactly the same problems some days ago. After three days going crazy with BIOS I decided contact with Gigabyte support and the answer is NOTHING!!!. What the hell?. I dont want anything about this kind of Beta product sold like premium and that finally gives so many headache. Good decission to return. Why we have to pay for BETA products ?.

Whyt the reviews lie?.

 

[Raviolissimo]

it's experiences like the OP's experience with the Gig Mboard that are the reason i only spec or buy hardware that's been available for a year.

the Core i7 is not just one hell of a computer, it's one hell of a complex computer. it's not realistic to think that it can be snapped together like a tinker-toy, one or 2 months after release.

also, computers have a near infinite ability to cause frustration.

for people who don't want to take a chance on hardware not working, i say, buy a Q9650. it's rock-solid reliable.

the IT manufacturers are in a financial crunch that is un-precedented in the industry. there is a lot of pressure on them to release motherboards to go with Intel's Core i7. i'm sure a lot of the Asus and Gigabyte engineers are working 50-60-70 hour weeks to get these things all working.

when i started in Silicon Valley, Amdahl and Fairchild were major employers. so, to me, to be able to go to a clone shop and spec the parts and ask a friend to help me build a computer that is comparable to an early Cray supercomputer - that's a heck of a lot of technology to put in a small box.

add in Vista, which has got to be a bigger hairball than any software that ever ran on an early Cray, and it's definitely a complex system. and complex systems take time to tweak.

 

[Keltoi]

I have replaced the Gigabyte with an Asus P6T Deluxe V2. I installed last night and experienced similar hard drive disappearing acts. It would seem that the problems stemmed from the firmware of the Seagate hard drive. The Gigabyte does have other bios problems, but I feel that they deserve an apology from me for my unfounded attack and for scaring away other potential customers. I am truly sorry for any damage done - stay away from Seagate.