Published on by

I have purchased a new mainboard on January 15, 2008 in anticipation of Intel's 45nm CPUs codenamed Penryn. I was forced into an upgrade from Intel's excellent D975XBX mainboard because it was an EOL product and there were no plans of validation for those new CPUs.

After considering PCI-Express 2.0 and deciding not to get PCI-Express 2.0 capable mainboard because current generation of video cards is unable to utilize the additional bandwidth and after deciding to stay away from DDR3 memory because of its unreasonable price I have realized that getting another Intel board would be too time consuming and expensive so I settled for Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. If you are at this point guessing by the title of this review that my decision was a mistake you are right. That is exactly why I am writing this review – in hope that I won't make the same mistake again.

In the past I already had some bad experience with Gigabyte's products. They were selling ATI Radeon 9600 and ATI Radeon 9600 SE video cards where both had 64-bit memory interface even though non-SE model was more expensive. I owned one GA-8I915P Duo Pro and one GA-8IPE1000 Pro2-W mainboard both of which started introducing audible noise (hissing and buzzing) into the audio signal after few months of use regardless of the sound card or the power supply used.

I have also contacted their technical support occasionaly but I never had any success in solving any of my issues. The main problem with Gigabyte's technical support is their complete inability to read plain English. They would ask you to try things you already tried several times, or ask you for the details which they already got in your first email, etc. To be fair, the other top-tier mainboard manufacturer isn't any better, but we won't be using that logical fallacy as an excuse today.

After such a poor customer experience I learned to avoid them, but after reading favorable reviews on some reputable review sites and after seeing that they have improved the component and build quality of their products I have decided to give them another chance.

Because there are so many favorable reviews on the Internet my article won't repeat what others have already said about this mainboard. Rather it will show only the negative side of the product and their technical support in a bid to draw the light onto their "take the money and run" attitude.

First thing I faced when I turned the computer on after reassembling it was the problem with my system drive not being detected. Needless to say, the drive worked just fine on D975XBX mainboard before that and other than the mainboard there were no other changes to the system. Actually the drive shows up in the list when the AHCI ROM module is initialized, but it doesn't show seconds later when the RAID ROM module takes over resulting in the inability to boot the system.

Of course, I have tried to replace the SATA and power cable, I have flashed the BIOS to the version F11 and I have tested the drive using manufacturer's diagnostic utlity and the drive checks out as OK. The only way to "fix" the problem is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot the system and then the drive shows up in both lists and the system is able to boot. This problem happens randomly upon the cold boot.

After having poor experience with their technical support in the past I was reluctant to contact them because my skin already starts to crawl when I start thinking how much patience, explaining and sending emails back and forth I will have to endure just to get the "advice" to update my BIOS even though I said that I already have the latest version several times, or worse yet to replace my mainboard as if I just love to be unable to work until I get through the RMA procedure risking that the problem will stay with me because it is most likely caused by a buggy BIOS.

So I decided to take a different route this time. I decided to dissect the BIOS and check whether Gigabyte BIOS engineers do their job correctly or not. Modern BIOS is comprised from several modules in addition to the main BIOS module. Those additional modules govern things such as your LAN, AHCI and RAID controllers and some of them such as CPU microcode update facility are responsible for the stability and correctness of the operation of your system as a whole.

I was particulary interested whether those ROM modules are up to date or not so I have used some of my own reverse-engineering tools to dismantle the BIOS update file into those modules and here is what I have found out:

  • AHCI ROM version is iSrc 1.07 dated 08042006 and RAID ROM version is v7.5.0.1017. Both are terribly outdated — I know because I have checked Intel's own BIOS files for their P35 based mainboards as well.
  • CPU microcode update for Core 2 Duo E8x00 series of CPUs — the module responsible for the correct operation of my CPU which contains important CPU errata fixes is also outdated. Gigabyte's revision is 0606 dated 20070912 while Intel's own mainboards have revision 060B dated 20080119 installed.

At this point it is crucial to remind you who gets the blame if Intel's CPU doesn't work properly thus making your system unreliable and if Intel's AHCI or RAID controller has a glitch and you lose important data. That's right — Intel. But is that rightfully so? Of course not! Intel is providing third party mainboard manufacturers with fixes and updates but they are not implementing them!

Why is that so? Because it is obvious that some third party mainboard manufacturers are greedy assholes who forget about the updates and support the moment they get your money.

Here is a screenshot from Gigabyte's technical support website:

Gigabytes's website

Make a mental note of the date when they released the last BIOS update and then take a look in your calendar. That's right, almost 4 (four!) months worth of no updates!

And here is a screenshot from Intel's technical support website:

Intel's website

As you can see, the BIOS has been updated fairly recently. As a sidenote, check the level of detail regarding the updates, fixes, and new features provided by Intel in the accompanying release notes. That is how everyone should do it.

In my opinion, there is simply no excuse for Gigabyte's lazyness and sloppyness. Not only other companies unrightfully get blamed when customers experience problems, but also those other companies and people who worked hard on an update or a fix do not get any credit for their work.

As for the customers they either learn to live with their problems or they undertake time, money and nerve consuming troubleshooting process in an attempt to solve them. Those attempts often do not bear any fruit because there is a weak link in the delivery chain called third party mainboard manufacturer.

I have taken the effort to write this article because I believe it is time for a change. Customers need to be able to get the updates for those ROM modules as soon as the original manufacturer releases them. We need a BIOS standard so that we can mix and match ROM modules on our own and to be able to continue self-supporting our products after mainboard manufacturer decides to stop doing so. Some of us who are tech savvy would gladly give up on warranty and technical support from the third party mainboard manufacturer if we had that level of control and comfort.

If those mainboard manufacturers used the same BIOS chip, the same flash tool and the same, unified, main BIOS code, and well-defined file format (for example EFI) then Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Marvell, Silicon Image, etc could start publishing updates to those critical ROM modules on their websites together with an RSS feed. We would have a tool which would periodically check those RSS feeds we specify as relevant, and automatically assemble the freshest possible BIOS for our system.

And before someone says "it should be open-source" — no it shouldn't, because we strive towards unification and simplification, not towards endless forking.