Is Asus the victim of industry backstabbers?

Yesterday KitGuru was privy to some rather interesting email chatter across the grapevine, which indicated that Asus had in fact advised  its partners to continue selling Sandy Bridge boards with potentially problematic slow drive controller issues. We love a little gossip…
So what's the truth?

The recent Intel Sandybridge Cougar Point issue will not have escaped anyone's attention. Having discovered that around 1 in 20 boards might experience an issue with a hard drive connected to the slow SATA ports in a couple of years' time, Intel put its hands up and issued a Total Recall.

KitGuru exclusively revealed the email sent to all of Intel's partners, telling them to stop selling and return everything for a full refund.

The problem is that only a tiny percentage of people will ever experience an issue, and it is really easy to work around.

For example, you can add in a PCI SATA controller and remove the problem completely. Also, if you attach your optical drive to the slow ports and have up to 2 drives in your system connected to the 6GB/sec SATA 2 ports – there is no problem at all.

Even with all the best will in the world, Intel (and its partners) won't be selling any new mainboards for Sandy Bridge before the end of April – possibly May. So what is the entire world + dog supposed to do until then.

Tempting to use the existing inventory intelligently, create systems that won't go wrong – and carry on selling. Remember, the Intel processors work 100% – no issue whatsoever – and it's easy to avoid the slow ports on the mainboard these days.

However intelligent it may be to ‘work around the problem with the stock you have available and carry on selling', this would seem to be a very unusual stance for the world's number one mainboard manufacturer.

That leads us to 2 questions:-

1) Is the rumour true – has Asus changed its advice to customers ?

2) If it is not true – then where did it come from ?

KitGuru has been in contact with the main men at Asus this morning, and we can say with 100% certainty that the company policy has not changed. Asus is recommending that people return product – in line with Intel's advice. That does not mean that resellers are compelled to do so. they are still able to create intelligent solutions with the products they have… But Asus' position is firm.

Other high profile news sites actually published details on this, claiming that emails were sent out between Asus and a partner.

When we asked Asus during the day they claimed this was not true and since then they have released RMA information over here.

So what caused the misunderstanding?

KitGuru says: We have heard from reliable sources, that one of ASUS competitors was actually one of the sources of this information, which we can only assume would be a rather underhanded move to damage public perception. We've checked and on Asus' high end boards a Marvell controller is used – which gives you 4x totally safe 6GB/sec connections. Plenty – no?

Let us know below who you think is responsible for casting dirt in the waters.

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