Rampage 69

Show Me The Quality!

NOTHING HAMMERS THE EMERGENCY BELLS QUITE AS FAST AS A HARDWARE FAILURE. When a customer comes in from a weekend off and a desktop or, God forbid, a server won’t power on, you’d better believe he’s going to light up your phone line. As catastrophic as the problem might seem, there’s usually little the reseller can do to prevent it. Often times, manufacturers aren’t even at fault when a piece of electronics dies. Talk about a frustrating service call. Fortunately, as you sit there troubleshooting, trying to figure out why that critical machine is stalled out, dead in the water, hardware vendors are trying to figure out how to make their components last longer.

Gigabyte recently invited me down to the company’s North American headquarters in the City of Industry to talk about improvements it has been making to its motherboards. The theory is that Gigabyte, by updating a few onboard parts, can drastically reduce the operating temperature of its boards and consequently extend the working life of the product many times over. The project, called Ultra Durable 2, involves using low RDS MOSFET transistors, ferrite core chokes, and solid capacitors. According to Gigabyte, the MOSFETs produce lower switching resistance. Of course, less resistance means less energy lost to heat, in turn yielding better efficiency and cooler operation. The ferrite core chokes reportedly do a better job storing energy. Again, the reduction in energy loss is a nod to efficiency. And finally, we’ve all heard the horror stories of leaking electrolytic capacitors causing the premature death of motherboards from a couple of vendors. Gigabyte’s solid capacitors based on an organic polymer deliver better resistance to extreme temperatures. Somehow, the more durable capacitors are interpreted to last up to 18 times longer. I’d be more comfortable telling a customer that they’re simply built to last longer than today’s capacitors.

An Eye On Quality
Take a close look at Gigabyte’s GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard. Ferrite chokes and organic polymer capacitors lining the processor socket help enhance reliability. Not pictured: Gigabyte’s MOSFETs, covered by passive copper cooling.

Representatives from Gigabyte’s lab team then went on to demonstrate thermal differences between the company’s motherboards based on Intel’s P35 chipset and a competing board of the same vintage. Over every piece of power circuitry—the MOSFETs, chokes, and capacitors—temperatures varied by double digits. On average, the readings were lower by more than 20 degrees Celsius. I’ll admit that there wasn’t any quantitative data showing that you’ll have fewer phone calls from angry customers with dead motherboards as a result of the beefier components. But an emphasis on higher quality hardware does give Gigabyte a competitive leg on which to stand in relation to the much-publicized problem of failed power hardware on high-end boards. I have to applaud the company’s aim at conquering a fickle enthusiast market by one-upping the other enthusiast-oriented brands.

The technology Gigabyte introduced isn’t exactly new. You can find solid capacitors and ferrite core chokes on server and workstation boards already. When you’re running dual quad-core processors and tens of gigabytes of memory, precise power regulation is imperative. However, Gigabyte says competing desktop products are still a generation behind. Hopefully that means its competitors will quickly follow suit and improve the quality of their offerings as well, making life a little easier on everyone.

There’s another angle from which you can approach the QA issue as a reseller. Why not pay closer attention to the warranties your vendors offer? Shouldn’t that speak volumes to a company’s faith in its product? All of Gigabyte’s motherboards, for example, carry a three-year guarantee. ASUS’ motherboards bear the same warranty term. Intel’s boxed boards are also covered for three years. The difference is that Intel equips its channel partners with an advanced warranty replacement program, getting another board out immediately in the event of a failure. Some of Intel’s competitors match the three-year warranty. Others dip down to two years. None of them step up with advanced warranty replacement.

Deceptively Simple
Intel’s DQ965GF motherboard might bear the Spartan layout of a business-class board, but its feature set, including SATA RAID, onboard graphics, and DDR2 memory support, is quite advanced. Intel covers the board with an advanced warranty replacement policy, too.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of vendors using better parts to help ensure their products last as long as possible. However, failures happen. Even in the servers I’ve built, there’s no getting around the hard drive that inexplicably conks out after a year of moderate use or the RAID card that starts throwing up errors for no real reason at all. You track the problem down, you address it quickly, and your customer gets back to business. The ability to get elbows-deep into that machine and immediately make things right is where the VAR stands out from the lumbering tier-one. At the end of the day, channel-friendly programs like Intel’s advanced warranty replacement might mean more to you than cooler capacitors.

Unfortunately, those little gems are often hidden under broader marketing motivations, so they’re easy to lose. If you’re interested in improving your response times and selling more stable systems, find the vendors who actively engage their channel partners. Chances are good that the companies willing to pay next-day shipping on a replacement motherboard are the ones confident that their products were built to last.