Over the past 20 months, we have seen some serious changes in the computer industry as many new products promising previously undelivered features have been rushed to market. The Internet has given us new, faster ways of communicating and hundreds, if not thousands of sites have popped up offering us ways of not only seeing these products, but also buying and evaluating them. We’ve seen Intel go from having a stranglehold on the Industry to eating crow as they struggled with the technical and political implications of the 8xx series of chipsets and RDRAM.
Following closely has been AMD with rising sales directly attributable to the problems at Intel and Rambus. The dramatic growth at AMD comes as they were finally able to demonstrate the first viable example of an Intel platform alternative in the PC market, although even then, with problems of their own.
This entire furor hasn’t hurt VIA either, whom many of us in the industry considered to be a second rate chipset maker (while some still do). VIA’s growth actually came on two fronts as they helped motherboard makers present a more cost effective (and available) if not somewhat more stable chipset solution for the Intel platforms that didn’t require RDRAM. On the AMD front, VIA was “bonding” to help AMD sell CPUs while the 760 chipset was still in development. Still AMD has had to deal with Irongate, the politics and technical quandaries of two separate manufacturing types (Aluminum in Texas and Copper in Dresden) and the fact that their own chipsets weren’t (aren’t) ready to deal with ATA-100 and other new technologies that arose while they were gearing up for Alpha testing for 3 new chipsets.
To make matters worse (as if they could be) the demand for PC’s was at an all time high, so OEMs from A to Z were literally pushing untested boards out the door while worrying about revisions and dealing with the problems later. This resulted in a glut of angry dealers and consumers alike as everyone rushed to the web every day looking for BIOS revisions and driver updates to fix existing problems. Of course this didn’t help everyone. Any Intel 820 Chipset owner can attest to that, never mind those with early KT133 and KM133 chipsets.
Unfortunately, the “rush to market” practices haven’t stopped. The DDR quandaries we see now are a direct result of early hype from memory and chipset makers promising RDRAM performance at half the cost, again causing premature releases of boards from just about every manufacturer. AMD hasn’t helped by breaking their own rules regarding certifying motherboards using strict standards. In fact at least half of the motherboards on AMD’s “approved” list don’t qualify if you read their own documentation regarding certification requirements. In the rush to make money, quality has suffered and consumers are the ones paying the price. Ethics? Forget it, the almighty dollar is hard at work and if you were looking for a stable configuration over the past year, your only real solution was the 6-year old Intel 440BX chipset.
Bulletin boards (like this one) haven’t helped either, as anxious users gather on mass to demand these new products without really understanding just what it is that they are asking for. Usually, they have been reading OEM propagandized specification sheets and “theoretical benchmarks” that show what a mature product COULD do, eventually, MAYBE. This can be a pretty rude wake up call when the user discovers that real-time performance is anything but what was promised, never mind the stability and compatibility issues that arise from such a short conception to production time.
Finally, we’ve seen some dramatic political shifts at the manufacturers themselves. Some have simply just given up doing any support whatsoever. It’s easier for them to continue pushing defective boxes and raking in the cash than it is to admit there is a problem. When they do admit it, they simply say that they will fix it in the next revision. So where does that leave you and the rest of the people with what you bought? Nowhere.
As a good example, Asus, once known for having the fastest, most reliable products on the market has become a second-rate white box supplier with unannounced board revisions in every (yes, every) shipment to the United States. If you are an Asus dealer, you are certainly aware of the “You have to open the box to see what you got” syndrome. Unfortunately, some reviewers have failed to mention all of the bad news at Asus like the fact that they have lost two major distributors because of support issues alone. We are also aware of another distributor that until last week was in negotiations to carry Asus products. They finally gave up citing questionable business and support practices on the part of Asus and the potential negative impacts to their dealers and thus, negative impacts on them. (No distributor wants to lose business because of bad situations with a manufacturer). Asus rushed the A7M266 to market so fast that literally every aspect of the board had bugs. The AMR slot compatibility, the USB compatibility, the memory compatibility, the CPU/BUS speeds, the chipset/BIOS, the AGP4xPro, and so on. And if you are looking for the integrated 3Com 10/100 Ethernet controller, don’t bother because it isn’t there. A quick trip to the FAQ’s for the A7M266 should tell you something. There aren’t any. Does anyone actually believe that nobody is asking questions?
As for other support issues, Asus has different information on every county’s web site. The U.S. Site has different information than Taiwan; the Germany site is different than either of those, and so on. What’s more, Asus has completely halted dealer support telephone or otherwise and has offered no web updates to the VAR areas since October of last year. If you call California with questions, they tell you that they don’t have any information and that you have to call Taiwan; the reverse applies if you call Taiwan. So where do people go for support? Tom’s Hardware is one of the major sites offering user to user and dealer to user support as even the Asus bulletin boards are too difficult to maneuver in and offer little useful information.
Of course Asus is not the only culprit in this bottomless pit of greed. Just about every OEM out there is too busy pounding out defective product to waste time supporting it. To make matters worse, OEMs don’t even bother showing up for conferences that they produce.
At Tuesday’s AMD OEM “Tech Tour” conference in Boston, AMD represented a person as an “Asus Factory Representative” who went on stage and talked briefly (and incorrectly) about Asus products. Immediately suspicious, (Because he was an Anglo and didn’t know the product line) I approached him in the hallway after his speech and asked him, “Do you work for Asus?” to which he replied, “Yes”. When I inquired about channel relationship issues he immediately stopped me and said, “Oh, I can’t address those issues.” When I asked why, he leaned closer and covered the side of his mouth saying, “I don’t really work for Asus”. As it turns out the guy is Elliot Shear, a sales rep. With Max Group in Boston. Yet, he himself and AMD were representing him to everyone as an Asus employee. When I made inquiries with the AMD reps at the show they at first stuck to their guns that the guy was an Asus employee until confronted with the truth. Then the three reps at the table change their story suddenly admitting that at the last minute Asus backed out of the show and this guy was sent to rep for them. Can anyone say fraudulent representation?
Next up? MSI. Inside the nice shiny booklet produced by AMD for the show is a full-page promotion of the new K7Master-S motherboard with a great picture of the board, a spec sheet and in bold letters a quote from the Tom’s Hardware review! In fact, this is the ONLY MSI board to get a full page in the booklet. Only trouble is, the board shipping doesn’t look anything like the board that Tom reviewed!
We went to the MSI booth and met with Vincent Yang, the Branch Manager of the MSI office in Edison, NJ. Immediately noticeable were the 6 motherboards laid out neatly on his table. When we inquired as to the whereabouts of the touted K7Master and K7Master-S motherboards what we heard shocked us. “Those came into California last week.” I replied, “Great, where are they?” to which he said, “We didn’t bring any.” So in other words, they came to the AMD show without the AMD based motherboards! When I asked why they didn’t bring them (after one of my engineers made a wise-crack about the wonders of Federal Express) we were given no explanation other than, “They weren’t available for us.” To which I could only reply, “Yeah, we know, we’re having the same problem.” He then told us that Avnet had plenty in stock, which really surprised us as our Avnet representative has been calling us every day telling us that MSI won’t give them a delivery date yet.
Being the smart guys we are, we headed for the Avnet booth. Avnet was a major sponsor of the show and were actually the ones that invited us. We arrived at their table and found a cardboard table tent saying simply, “Avnet”. But wait, no tablecloth, no people, no nothing. As it turns out, Avnet didn’t bother to attend the show. Go figure.
Next we spent an hour listening to AMD talk about how great their sales were last year and how great their company is while they tried to fix the failing overhead projections and audio problems. Then they marched up the major sponsors so they could all tell us how great they are and the wonders LAST YEARS products and sales. I was especially impressed to hear all about the GeForce2 and the TNT2. Oh yeah, this is why we went to the show.
We finally gave up and walked out in the middle of the AMD new products speech when the engineer from AMD told the crowd (of mostly end-users as there was no screening at the show at all) that, “All Thunderbirds have copper cores.” I actually interrupted his speech from the door and asked, “So you are saying that all Thunderbirds have copper cores and you aren’t making them in Texas” to which he replied, “Yes”. I figured that it was time to leave, so I pointed to my crew and we all walked out. Since everyone that works here has been to the Texas plant and has watched them make the things, I had heard enough.
The bottom line of this little rant is that you can’t trust anything from the OEMs anymore. We all know that for the past couple of years (okay, maybe longer) they have been saying one thing and doing another. AMD may want you to think there is, “absolutely no differences between a T-Bird and a Duron other than cache size” (which was also stated by this engineer to the crowd at the show) but if you believe that you must also believe that there is no difference between copper and aluminum, the CPU’s respective power consumptions, fire and water, air and vacuum, etc…
In retrospect, I only wish we would have eaten some of their mashed potatoes and Mexican food that was laid out about 2 and a half hours into the show, never mind sticking around long enough to see if we had won any door prizes. Frankly, it was just too frustrating to listen to. It’s a real good thing nobody from AMD has made a follow-up call to us, I would have to tell them that we will be doing a lot more with the 815 Chipsets until AMD can re-earn minimal levels of trust once again.
The real reason behind writing all of this out is just to show everyone that the circle of lies, exaggerations and hype from the OEMs isn't over. If you are looking to buy a new product you should do your own extensive research and buy products from a dealer that you trust.
The days of the quick sale need to end and to be honest, your best bet is to buy something that has been on the market and SHIPPING for at LEAST 4 months. This way you will have an opportunity to see how the product has been shaking out, what the problems are and what is being done to rectify them. It is more and more apparent that the new products have many hidden problems and YOU will be the one that suffers from them. Don't believe everything you read or hear or even see, because it might be different tomorrow. Stick to proven technologies that may not be the "fastest thing available", but will save you many headaches, tons of money and maybe save you from being lied to by people that think money is more important than ethics and doing IT right.
Steve Benoit
Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'
Following closely has been AMD with rising sales directly attributable to the problems at Intel and Rambus. The dramatic growth at AMD comes as they were finally able to demonstrate the first viable example of an Intel platform alternative in the PC market, although even then, with problems of their own.
This entire furor hasn’t hurt VIA either, whom many of us in the industry considered to be a second rate chipset maker (while some still do). VIA’s growth actually came on two fronts as they helped motherboard makers present a more cost effective (and available) if not somewhat more stable chipset solution for the Intel platforms that didn’t require RDRAM. On the AMD front, VIA was “bonding” to help AMD sell CPUs while the 760 chipset was still in development. Still AMD has had to deal with Irongate, the politics and technical quandaries of two separate manufacturing types (Aluminum in Texas and Copper in Dresden) and the fact that their own chipsets weren’t (aren’t) ready to deal with ATA-100 and other new technologies that arose while they were gearing up for Alpha testing for 3 new chipsets.
To make matters worse (as if they could be) the demand for PC’s was at an all time high, so OEMs from A to Z were literally pushing untested boards out the door while worrying about revisions and dealing with the problems later. This resulted in a glut of angry dealers and consumers alike as everyone rushed to the web every day looking for BIOS revisions and driver updates to fix existing problems. Of course this didn’t help everyone. Any Intel 820 Chipset owner can attest to that, never mind those with early KT133 and KM133 chipsets.
Unfortunately, the “rush to market” practices haven’t stopped. The DDR quandaries we see now are a direct result of early hype from memory and chipset makers promising RDRAM performance at half the cost, again causing premature releases of boards from just about every manufacturer. AMD hasn’t helped by breaking their own rules regarding certifying motherboards using strict standards. In fact at least half of the motherboards on AMD’s “approved” list don’t qualify if you read their own documentation regarding certification requirements. In the rush to make money, quality has suffered and consumers are the ones paying the price. Ethics? Forget it, the almighty dollar is hard at work and if you were looking for a stable configuration over the past year, your only real solution was the 6-year old Intel 440BX chipset.
Bulletin boards (like this one) haven’t helped either, as anxious users gather on mass to demand these new products without really understanding just what it is that they are asking for. Usually, they have been reading OEM propagandized specification sheets and “theoretical benchmarks” that show what a mature product COULD do, eventually, MAYBE. This can be a pretty rude wake up call when the user discovers that real-time performance is anything but what was promised, never mind the stability and compatibility issues that arise from such a short conception to production time.
Finally, we’ve seen some dramatic political shifts at the manufacturers themselves. Some have simply just given up doing any support whatsoever. It’s easier for them to continue pushing defective boxes and raking in the cash than it is to admit there is a problem. When they do admit it, they simply say that they will fix it in the next revision. So where does that leave you and the rest of the people with what you bought? Nowhere.
As a good example, Asus, once known for having the fastest, most reliable products on the market has become a second-rate white box supplier with unannounced board revisions in every (yes, every) shipment to the United States. If you are an Asus dealer, you are certainly aware of the “You have to open the box to see what you got” syndrome. Unfortunately, some reviewers have failed to mention all of the bad news at Asus like the fact that they have lost two major distributors because of support issues alone. We are also aware of another distributor that until last week was in negotiations to carry Asus products. They finally gave up citing questionable business and support practices on the part of Asus and the potential negative impacts to their dealers and thus, negative impacts on them. (No distributor wants to lose business because of bad situations with a manufacturer). Asus rushed the A7M266 to market so fast that literally every aspect of the board had bugs. The AMR slot compatibility, the USB compatibility, the memory compatibility, the CPU/BUS speeds, the chipset/BIOS, the AGP4xPro, and so on. And if you are looking for the integrated 3Com 10/100 Ethernet controller, don’t bother because it isn’t there. A quick trip to the FAQ’s for the A7M266 should tell you something. There aren’t any. Does anyone actually believe that nobody is asking questions?
As for other support issues, Asus has different information on every county’s web site. The U.S. Site has different information than Taiwan; the Germany site is different than either of those, and so on. What’s more, Asus has completely halted dealer support telephone or otherwise and has offered no web updates to the VAR areas since October of last year. If you call California with questions, they tell you that they don’t have any information and that you have to call Taiwan; the reverse applies if you call Taiwan. So where do people go for support? Tom’s Hardware is one of the major sites offering user to user and dealer to user support as even the Asus bulletin boards are too difficult to maneuver in and offer little useful information.
Of course Asus is not the only culprit in this bottomless pit of greed. Just about every OEM out there is too busy pounding out defective product to waste time supporting it. To make matters worse, OEMs don’t even bother showing up for conferences that they produce.
At Tuesday’s AMD OEM “Tech Tour” conference in Boston, AMD represented a person as an “Asus Factory Representative” who went on stage and talked briefly (and incorrectly) about Asus products. Immediately suspicious, (Because he was an Anglo and didn’t know the product line) I approached him in the hallway after his speech and asked him, “Do you work for Asus?” to which he replied, “Yes”. When I inquired about channel relationship issues he immediately stopped me and said, “Oh, I can’t address those issues.” When I asked why, he leaned closer and covered the side of his mouth saying, “I don’t really work for Asus”. As it turns out the guy is Elliot Shear, a sales rep. With Max Group in Boston. Yet, he himself and AMD were representing him to everyone as an Asus employee. When I made inquiries with the AMD reps at the show they at first stuck to their guns that the guy was an Asus employee until confronted with the truth. Then the three reps at the table change their story suddenly admitting that at the last minute Asus backed out of the show and this guy was sent to rep for them. Can anyone say fraudulent representation?
Next up? MSI. Inside the nice shiny booklet produced by AMD for the show is a full-page promotion of the new K7Master-S motherboard with a great picture of the board, a spec sheet and in bold letters a quote from the Tom’s Hardware review! In fact, this is the ONLY MSI board to get a full page in the booklet. Only trouble is, the board shipping doesn’t look anything like the board that Tom reviewed!
We went to the MSI booth and met with Vincent Yang, the Branch Manager of the MSI office in Edison, NJ. Immediately noticeable were the 6 motherboards laid out neatly on his table. When we inquired as to the whereabouts of the touted K7Master and K7Master-S motherboards what we heard shocked us. “Those came into California last week.” I replied, “Great, where are they?” to which he said, “We didn’t bring any.” So in other words, they came to the AMD show without the AMD based motherboards! When I asked why they didn’t bring them (after one of my engineers made a wise-crack about the wonders of Federal Express) we were given no explanation other than, “They weren’t available for us.” To which I could only reply, “Yeah, we know, we’re having the same problem.” He then told us that Avnet had plenty in stock, which really surprised us as our Avnet representative has been calling us every day telling us that MSI won’t give them a delivery date yet.
Being the smart guys we are, we headed for the Avnet booth. Avnet was a major sponsor of the show and were actually the ones that invited us. We arrived at their table and found a cardboard table tent saying simply, “Avnet”. But wait, no tablecloth, no people, no nothing. As it turns out, Avnet didn’t bother to attend the show. Go figure.
Next we spent an hour listening to AMD talk about how great their sales were last year and how great their company is while they tried to fix the failing overhead projections and audio problems. Then they marched up the major sponsors so they could all tell us how great they are and the wonders LAST YEARS products and sales. I was especially impressed to hear all about the GeForce2 and the TNT2. Oh yeah, this is why we went to the show.
We finally gave up and walked out in the middle of the AMD new products speech when the engineer from AMD told the crowd (of mostly end-users as there was no screening at the show at all) that, “All Thunderbirds have copper cores.” I actually interrupted his speech from the door and asked, “So you are saying that all Thunderbirds have copper cores and you aren’t making them in Texas” to which he replied, “Yes”. I figured that it was time to leave, so I pointed to my crew and we all walked out. Since everyone that works here has been to the Texas plant and has watched them make the things, I had heard enough.
The bottom line of this little rant is that you can’t trust anything from the OEMs anymore. We all know that for the past couple of years (okay, maybe longer) they have been saying one thing and doing another. AMD may want you to think there is, “absolutely no differences between a T-Bird and a Duron other than cache size” (which was also stated by this engineer to the crowd at the show) but if you believe that you must also believe that there is no difference between copper and aluminum, the CPU’s respective power consumptions, fire and water, air and vacuum, etc…
In retrospect, I only wish we would have eaten some of their mashed potatoes and Mexican food that was laid out about 2 and a half hours into the show, never mind sticking around long enough to see if we had won any door prizes. Frankly, it was just too frustrating to listen to. It’s a real good thing nobody from AMD has made a follow-up call to us, I would have to tell them that we will be doing a lot more with the 815 Chipsets until AMD can re-earn minimal levels of trust once again.
The real reason behind writing all of this out is just to show everyone that the circle of lies, exaggerations and hype from the OEMs isn't over. If you are looking to buy a new product you should do your own extensive research and buy products from a dealer that you trust.
The days of the quick sale need to end and to be honest, your best bet is to buy something that has been on the market and SHIPPING for at LEAST 4 months. This way you will have an opportunity to see how the product has been shaking out, what the problems are and what is being done to rectify them. It is more and more apparent that the new products have many hidden problems and YOU will be the one that suffers from them. Don't believe everything you read or hear or even see, because it might be different tomorrow. Stick to proven technologies that may not be the "fastest thing available", but will save you many headaches, tons of money and maybe save you from being lied to by people that think money is more important than ethics and doing IT right.
Steve Benoit
Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'
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