More on the ICH6RW

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Intel ICH6RW Recall Pending:
While we are unsure if it will be classified as a "recall", there are certainly going to be many new Intel equipped motherboards pulled back from the channel as reported here on Thursday. The ICH6RW southbridge chipset supports the new motherboard 925/915 chipsets from Intel and were launched earlier this week. From information obtained today, it looks as though Intel is using a yet to be announced fabrication process on their ICH6RW chipset that is running them into some trouble due to leaking current. It was related to us that the leaking current could weaken the onboard battery prematurely causing BIOS resets, which would of course dump all the configuration settings in the BIOS back to default. With current RAID setups and such supported in the BIOS, a loss of BIOS settings could cause a no-boot situation as the RAID configuration is lost. Even though this could be easily fixed for the short term, it is surely an issue that Intel is currently taking seriously.

An estimated number of 100,000 units are to be impacted with this issue. Retailers and distributors are currently pulling many brands of 925/915 motherboards out of the channel. Our performance testing of 925/915 can be found here . We are still waiting on an official statement from Intel.

**UPDATE** 6/24/04 11:08pm: It has been confirmed that this problem is NOT an overall problem or defect with the new ICH6 southbridge. It is rather being classified as a "Fab Excursion." It seems as though a layer of thin film was not properly removed from the ICH6 chipsets causing the current leakage. Intel has identified which chipsets have been affected and will be removing those from the marketplace. An official statement will be forthcoming, but we have been told that all 925/915 boards in the channel are being pulled for the shelves for refund. Seeing how no PCI-Express video cards are for sale, I doubt very many of these motherboards have been sold.

**UPDATE** 6/25/04 11:39am: Intel did give us a statement to pass along to you. This of course verifies most of our previously reported information.

Intel has identified a manufacturing excursion that affects a limited number of I/O controllers that are part of the 915/925 chipsets. This excursion -- caused by incomplete removal of thin film on the die pad area – makes the controller susceptible to excessive leakage in the Real Time Clock (RTC) circuitry. If you were to get one of these controllers, the likely results would be a failure to boot, a system hang, or other anomalous system behavior. We are checking 915/925 chipsets that were shipped prior to, and as of, the day of launch (June 21, 2004). We have asked for affected shipments of this product to be returned to Intel for inspection or replacement. We believe almost none (a few thousand units) of the impacted product has reached the end customer. We are working with our customers to find the impacted manufacturing lots and replace them with good product. All product shipping now is unaffected—this is not an errata or “bug”.

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