Intel DK440LX motherboard

INTEL DK440LX MOTHERBOARD.

One of my editing computers uses an Intel DK440LX motherboard that came as a turnkey system from Digital Processing Systems. DPS purchased around 93 of these motherboards & have had numerous problems with them. The motherboard is now obsolete, but I thought it noteworthy to mention some of the problems here, as a product with this many design flaws & poor customer support often indicates an entire product line you might want to steer clear of.

SCSI DRIVERS NOT ON THE NT INSTALL CD: The Adaptec AIC-7895 SCSI controller built on this motherboard came out after the original Windows NT 4.0 install disk was published. It is therefore necessary to download the appropriate driver from the Intel site & very carefully follow the instructions for extraction of the driver & when to insert the floppy during NT install. Unfortunately Intel doesn't include the driver extraction instructions as a readme.txt file with the driver, so you have to have read the instruction on their web site. The download is made unnecessarily complicated because the driver has one self extracting zip within another self extracting zip & if you didn't read the separate instructions, you wouldn't know that the second self extracting zip has to be extracted using the -d option (under Start Run, filename.exe -d) so files are put in the appropriate folders. Other manufacturers have managed to make this procedure much less painful. The bottom line is that installation of Windows NT on a SCSI drive is anything but simple on this motherboard.

SCSI BOOT DRIVE NEEDS LOW LEVEL FORMATTING: Assuming you managed to get past the stage of getting the SCSI driver properly extracted onto a floppy, your next roadblock to installing NT on a SCSI drive will be the fact that it won't install NT on a SCSI drive unless the SCSI drive has been low level formatted first. You won't find this anywhere in the manual or the Intel web site. If you have a completely empty SCSI drive with or without partitioning, the Intel DK440LX motherboard will not allow complete installation of NT & it doesn't tell you why. Only through experimentation did I discover that this motherboard needs to see a completely empty low level formatted SCSI drive before it will install NT.

SCSI & IDE DRIVE CONFLICTS: My DK440LX computer has been using only SCSI devices (no IDE devices) because that is what most manufacturers of nonlinear editing products recommend. Recently I decided to add a new large 30 GB IDE drive just for backup storage of files (I tried a Maxtor & an IBM Deskstar). Unfortunately, I couldn't get the IDE drives to be recognized in Windows NT Disk Administrator, it would only recognize them in the bios. It turns out that Intel never bothered to check to see if an IDE drive (of any size) would actually be seen in the NT operating system when a SCSI drive was the boot drive. If the IDE drive is the boot drive & the SCSI drives are just work file drives, then the IDE drive will be recognized. The second problem is that if the IDE drive is the boot drive, but it's over 8.4 GB in size, Windows NT Disk Administrator will only recognize the first 8.4 GB of the drive, even with the newest P10 bios for this motherboard which is suppose to fix that problem. This is not a problem with Windows NT Disk Administrator because it works fine on other motherboards, this is another problem with the Intel DK440LX motherboard. Clearly this motherboard was designed primarily for IDE drives (though that isn't stated anywhere) & the fact that it also is suppose to work with SCSI drives too at the same time as IDE clearly escaped the testers at Intel, at least for those instances when the SCSI drive is the boot drive.

MOTHERBOARDS BLOW UP: Last fall 1.5 years after I first got this motherboard it blew up & electrically damaged all 5 circuit boards that where plugged into the motherboard. I took it back to DPS who replaced the motherboard & some of the editing boards & I had to buy a new graphics card. While at DPS they pointed to a shelf that had 21 identical DK440LX motherboards that had the same or similar power surge problems. Apparently Intel was denying that there was a design fault & DPS was having a hard time getting approval from Intel for warranty repairs. Mine was the last of the bunch to go defective. When mine power surged, all I was doing was turning the power switch off during a hard reset (OS had locked up). My computer was protected by an uninterruptable power supply & as it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the internal power supply either. This was simply a design flaw which Intel didn't want to fess up to, but apparently came up with a fix for, without acknowledging that there was a flaw. That incident cost me a lot of money & down time.

MEMORY SCAM: Elsewhere on this site is another article on the memory scam that Intel has imposed on it's customers in order to increase the price of RAM & get a piece of the action on the ram that goes into this motherboard.

By now it should be abundantly clear that Intel didn't do a very thorough job of designing & testing this motherboard or patching it up with better bios software. I expect big companies like Intel to do a better job & if they do design something poorly, they can still make up for it with good customer support, software patches until all known bugs are gone & a good knowledge base (none of which Intel provided). Intel clearly was too willing to declare this an obsolete motherboard & drop any further software & documentation refinements. I can't comment on the current line of Intel motherboards, but if this was any example of how well Intel makes & supports their motherboards then I certainly can't recommend them.

By Doug Hembruff.
Last updated Aug. 26/2000