Nightmares of returning a motherboard

[starfury1]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Solder mask is the Green colour you see on the pcb
(it should really be uniform across the pcb not have patches on it)

The idea is so solder will not adhere to any part of the pcb covered in it
(its part of how they construct the pcb)

As I said this can be a trap when building your own systems, how do you proof its a faulty pcb cause they will assume you have done something wrong at best or blown the board at worsted.

I do remembered reading you post on the USB port issue.
and mate that would have been the time to never deal with that mob again.
(regardless of who's fault it was)

Obviously bad karma was created then and unfortunately for you it has now snow balled

Its sounds like you are between a rock and a hard place and at there mercy

So I guess if you don't want to make waves, then you will have to salvage what you can of this bad situation.

sounds like the pcb might be a dud to me so get rid of it

Do the best deal you can with them and check the (new or old) pcb over before you leave.

All you can do I suppose is be nice
(yeah I know this means bitting your tongue)
(you catch more flies with honey then with vinegar)

See if you can work out a middle ground with them.

maybe see if they mind you building it there so they can be satisfied you are doing it correctly,
or maybe get them to build it while you watch
although it sounds like a bit too much water has gone under the bridge for that


beat in mind once you leave the shop with a new pcb...any come back they will probably blame it on you regardless.

sad situation

please understand
I don't know you and I don't know the people at the shop so all I can be is a passive observer and comment, based on what you say

good luck with it Stevo

[gonzo0815]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Is this the only hardware shop at your location? ok probably i am on the lucky side with a bunch of very profesionall & big shop in an 10km radius and numerouse online sellers with one day standard shipping......but i would not buy anything from sutch an fucked up shop.

[shadow]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Yer I second that! If you can help it, just don't do any more business with that store after this episode. Getting into arguments and stuff just will not help. Personally I would get whatever I can with respect to the Gigabyte board and run away to another store!

[starfury1]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

ERr that should have been "bare" not "beat" in mind. DOH!

Yeah definitely sounds like a mob not deal with

and run away to another store!

Ditto:

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Today I got some news that the Gigabyte GA-8i945P-G motherboard came back "repaired". I'll have to go up there and deal with the store about the new Intel motherboard and how much extra I have to pay for the Intel motherboard. At the moment I have to pay roughly an extra $100AUD.
I fell that $100 is a bit too much so I may opt for an MSI 945P Neo motherboard or an Asus motherboard instead?? How are they quality wise.

How does thier warranty work out here in Australia. Last time I bought an Asus motherboard that had a 3 year warranty on the box, It turned out that it only had 1 year warranty when I bought it to the shop. I'm not sure about MSI though.

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Is this the only hardware shop at your location? ok probably i am on the lucky side with a bunch of very profesionall & big shop in an 10km radius and numerouse online sellers with one day standard shipping......but i would not buy anything from sutch an fucked up shop.

This isn't the only shop in my area, but I can tell you that this shop is better than other stores around here.
At this store, I can actually return things, One of my customers shopped at a store that refused to return his DVD burner even though it was only 1 week old and in warranty. They eventually took it back for warranty, but never gave it back to him. He had to bribe them money to get the DVD burner back to him. He bought a Sony DVD burner and got a Pioneer one back.

There are some other shops around here, but they are very bad, then even give you all factory seconds parts at times and also rip you off badly.

[kc8adu]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

This isn't the only shop in my area, but I can tell you that this shop is better than other stores around here.
At this store, I can actually return things, One of my customers shopped at a store that refused to return his DVD burner even though it was only 1 week old and in warranty. They eventually took it back for warranty, but never gave it back to him. He had to bribe them money to get the DVD burner back to him. He bought a Sony DVD burner and got a Pioneer one back.

There are some other shops around here, but they are very bad, then even give you all factory seconds parts at times and also rip you off badly.

we had a store like that nearby.seems they got lots of qc rejects that should have gone into the masher.
stores name was micro direct but due to all the doa/buggy stuff we called them micro defect.
everybody called me when they folded and wondered why i didnt go to the auction.
they were saving on their rumpke bill by selling all that trash!
folks figured that out later!

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Hello Everyone,

I haven't been back here for a while but I have some news....

I finally ordered my new motherboard. I ordered the Intel BOXDP965LTCK motherboard with the Intel P965 chipset. It supports Core 2 Duo, and maybe Core 2 Quad also.

I only had to pay an extra $60 for it ($50 trade in cost and $10 delivery fee).

Also to my surprise, the store which I highly disliked in the past has now owned up to thier mistakes.... The owner of the shop finally tested the garbage RMA Gigabyte GA-8i945P-G and found it to be faulty.

It was faulty even after the owner sent the board into RMA a few weeks back.... I wonder if the people at the repair center even bothered to fix it?? I did come to the shop 2 weeks ago to pick up other things from the salesman and I saw the board come back in the exact same condition with the melted PCI area etc.

Even though there was paperwork claiming that the board had been officially fixed by the repair center....

It is about time they would believe me that this motherboard was faulty.... I don't lie about items being faulty.... returning items usually causes trouble for both sides of the customer and shop end.

Anyway, looking at the Intel motherboard online, it looks quite large compared to my old Gigabyte one. The choice of caps that Intel chose are very good. From an image which I aqquired online, I saw that the large caps were Rubycon, the small caps look to be nichicon maybe?? Around the CPU area, Intel has decided to install SMT caps, maybe Nichicon made.

The Firewire function actually comes in handy now (I Just hope it doesnt die in the future), I can now install my I-Will Firewire card into another PC....

I will see how my future with the Intel motherboard goes.... I have used 2 Intel SE440BX-2 motherboards in the past (PII/PIII Slot 1 era).... they were great boards. They didn't overclock well at all, but I don't care about overclocking because i'm not an overclocker. This board also comes with a 3 year warranty which is quite handy if anything does go wrong.

I do have a few questions regarding Intel motherboards etc.

* How are Intel motherboards for quality / reliability compared to MSI, Asus and Gigabyte etc.

* Has anyone seen a failed Intel motherboard?? I personally haven't.... But I have seen people online rarely talking about faulty Intel motherboards. Also some people talking about the failed Nichicon HM/HN caps on some of them.

* Are Intel motherboards made by Foxconn?? Personally, I don't care.... just as long as there is a 3 year warranty and it if works properly is all I care about.

* -OFF TOPIC- Is it true that LGA775 sockets will be damaged after a few CPU insertions?? There are a few websites onle which claim to have inserted and remove LGA775 CPUs more than 20 times with no problems at all....



Thanks.

[shadow]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

That looks like one nice motherboard there. You are right that it is larger, it uses 9 screw holes so I presume it is about the same size as my MSI dual P3 motherboard. And that was large! Well in comparison to my other boards. Having said this the components seem to be spaced out a lot, which is good in a way and bad. Good in that there won't be as many heat issues, larger caps are probably used. Bad in that it takes up more space.

I do not think that Intel boards are made by Foxconn. However I can not be sure.

[willawake]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

I finally ordered my new motherboard. I ordered the Intel BOXDP965LTCK motherboard

can you tell me what your ICH8 temperature is when you get it up an running

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

can you tell me what your ICH8 temperature is when you get it up an running

Sure, No problem. Just out of curiousity, what brand mainboard do you use?? Also Intel or something different?? Different brand mainboards may have a difference in the reading because Intel has decided to have a heatsink on the ICH8 chip.... which is a good thing.

Intel do have a software utility (e.g. something like the Gigabyte Easytune or Asus PC Probe software) for me to do this right??

I use an Intel P4 530J series CPU, so will that make a difference in ICH8 temperature readings at all compared to Core 2 Duo etc.??

Does anyone know if the newer series of Intel motherboards still have a splash screen when the PC boots up??

I know the old series of Intel boards did, but I haven't seen one for ages so I'm not very sure.
I know that Asus boards have a splash screen when the PC boots. ECS boards dont and have a display of PC specifications when the PC boots. I prefer the splash screen.... it just better in my opinion.

Thanks.

[Topcat]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Intel and Asus should both be good, I dont care to much for MSI. Best thing about Intel is the customer service, if the board dies they will ship one overnight air.

2nd on Intel. One of my SHG2 server boards died about a week after I installed it. I called them, had the situation handled in 10 minutes. 9am the next morning, there was my new board.

[hardwareguy]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

I don't know what was up with Gigabyte. They now make great boards and in the past their boards were great, but for a period around 2005-2006, we had issues left and right! It wasn't ECS, but there for a bit it was close!

The most notorious offender was a certain Socket 754 board with an nForce 3 chipset, all three of the boards my friends have had are now dead, although I must be fair in saying that one of them was taken out by a Radmax PSU that decided to go out with a bang.... shorted O/P rectifiers tend to be a nip destructive.

One of the last nForce 2 boards they made was VERY picky about RAM.

I currently am running on a Gigabyte K8N Ultra SLI board and I love it, the only flaw it has is it doesn't OC quite as well as some other boards do. The first one of these we got in was defective.... gave a post error tone that sounded like EEEEE-ERRRR. That obscure two tone means that either the CPU is bad or the HT bus has malfunctioned. We joke about this one all the time, it gets mentioned at every LAN party. :p

The new boards seem to be good from what people are saying, but I think I'll stick with eVGA for my gaming rigs for now.

[willawake]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

Sure, No problem. Just out of curiousity, what brand mainboard do you use??

yeah i was installing an intel dg965ry. i aint finished installing it yet which gives an idea about how busy it is in the office. the ich8 was 76oC with heatsink

there is an intel utility intel desktop utilities to do all that with the temps and psu voltages.

i would recommend to install the audio driver with intel audio studio if you are gonna go for onboard audio. it is a hell of a lot more attractive looking than the ancient style sigmatel interface.

there is a splash screen on boot and the bios codes in the bottom right corner. i would prefer to disable it though. it isnt as cool as the intel desktop boards old one.....

[Neo2_000]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

I have worked in a small computer shop for a number of years where the business owner does his best to do the right thing by his customers. The two systems we make are Intel and Gigabyte. Neither of these are perfect but have proven to be fairly reliable given the fact that we live in a zone of one of the highest lightning strike rates in thew world.

The one thing I have observed with both brands is they are cut above in their choice of caps and evolve where they make unwitting mistakes such as the Nichicon HM series. The new Gigabyte boards boast solid polymer caps.

I do not trust Asus boards because we ventured out and purchased 6 once. Half failed immediately and the others plagued us with problems till we replaced them. My friend just gave me a high end Asus board which died after about a year. I also remember a factory fault in an early Asus board which I personally owned. It was eventually resolved due to a rogue Asus tech acknowledging the issue and leaking a fix while the company's official policy was to steadfastly deny it's existence.

I think that good choices are Intel, HP or Dell since they have good customer support and quality control but I would be willing to try a Gigabyte providing I was dealing with a reputable vendor who I knew would look after me.

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

yeah i was installing an intel dg965ry. i aint finished installing it yet which gives an idea about how busy it is in the office. the ich8 was 76oC with heatsink

there is an intel utility intel desktop utilities to do all that with the temps and psu voltages.

I just got my board today. It's a great board.... The fans all run quieter than before which is good.

I just checked the ICH8 temperature and it showed 48c in BIOS. The highest the ICH temperature got to, was around 64c.

Intel Desktop Utilities doesn't show any temperatures etc. Just hardware info and thats about it.
I have to use the BIOS to check out the temperatures.

i would recommend to install the audio driver with intel audio studio if you are gonna go for onboard audio. it is a hell of a lot more attractive looking than the ancient style sigmatel interface.

there is a splash screen on boot and the bios codes in the bottom right corner. i would prefer to disable it though. it isnt as cool as the intel desktop boards old one....

Intel audio studio is great. The layout is better than the Sigmatel control panel on my Dell laptop.

The BIOS splash screen is pretty OK, not too bad. At least it's better than a bunch of words and system specs....

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Nightmares of returning a motherboard

I finally got the Intel Desktop Utilities working properly today. With some load on the CPU, the I/O controller hub (ICH8) temperature was 48c. I like Intel's idea of using a digital and analog reading of the temperatures and voltages.