Intel Memory Scam

Dec. 30/98

The following message was sent Dec. 30/98 to the DPS beta test team, because many of them use the Intel motherboard described here. You should be aware that if you buy an Intel motherboard, you may be subjected to paying much higher than normal prices for ram upgrades.

Hi All

I can hardly believe I've wasted another couple days trying to find ram that will work in this Intel DK440LX motherboard (that houses my PVR-RT). I was suppose to be doing catch up editing this week. I thought that I might as well share what I've found out, as some of you are bound to run into this problem too. After reading everything regarding ram for this motherboard on the Intel site, I stumbled across this little sleeper statement:

"A series of beeps during POST (booting) with the pattern 1-3-3-1 indicates that there was a problem during memory detection. Check to ensure system memory is properly installed. This error may also occur if the Serial Presence Detect (SPD) EEPROM data on SDRAM DIMMs is either missing or is not programmed correctly."

After further investigation, I found that there are 29 manufacturers who are "Approved" to sell ram for this motherboard. These companies & their links are found at http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/dk/DK_MEM.HTM After phoning several wholesalers & distributors for these companies, it was starting to appear that Intel will approve these companies & tell them what to program in the Serial Presence Detect EEPROM for a price. Of course this price results in a ram module price often almost twice that of comparable ram without the approval. It would appear that this Intel motherboard is programmed not to boot if you don't have one of the approved SDRAM modules with the properly programmed code in the Serial Presence Detect EEPROM. Some distributors & dealers tried to justify it by saying that this was Intels way of controlling the quality of the ram that goes into their motherboard. Most readily admitted though that ram either works or it doesn't & that failures usual occur within a day if the ram is going to fail.

Now I'm not an expert on ram & I'd like to believe that Intel has had some quality issues to deal with from memory chips manufactured by offshore commodity brokers, but it seems to me that Intel has gone too far by purposely programming their motherboard to not boot if it didn't see the approval code programmed in the memory chip & by charging manufacturers for the approval. There must be hundreds of manufacturers who make memory that would work fine & aren't willing to pay an approval fee to Intel to get the programming code so they can sell their memory to users of this motherboard. Only a big company like Intel could try this & get away with it. I also heard rumors that Compaq does the same thing with their Pentium II motherboards.

I'm not against Intel trying to implement some quality control if it's really needed, but what really irks me is that all of Intel's literature for this motherboard implies that it is so versatile & automatic at configuring to a wide variety of memory types (even a mixture of types). Unless you dig real deep, they fail to mention that only 29 approved manufacturers (out of hundreds), will actually work. And I had to talk to others in the industry to find out that they were paying Intel for this approval.

I have yet to prove absolutely that all of the memory chips I tried didn't boot because they lacked the approval code programmed into the Serial Presence Detect EEPROM, but nobody denied it. When all these chips met the spec requirements of Intel but lacked the approval code, there isn't much else it could be. The likelihood that all 5 locally bought memory chips were defective or had the wrong specs are pretty low. I did have several people tell me that there is a lot of no name brand memory floating around & that it often is more likely to show up in a backwater nowhereville town like London Ontario, than in large centers or for companies who buy large quantities through established commercial channels rather than through consumer retail stores. This probably explains why Scott didn't have any problem obtaining & installing ram successfully on his Intel motherboard.

Anyway, pass the word around so others using this recommended motherboard can make sure they buy one of the 29 approved brands. I do think that a caution or link should be put on the DPS web site when recommending this motherboard, so others won't get as frustrated as I did & can be told up front that if they buy this motherboard, they should be prepared to pay extra for ram & that only approved ram will work. If Intel doesn't have the corporate integrity to inform their customers up front, I think DPS should, or simply not recommend Intel motherboards. DPS's approved lists can effect tens of thousands of purchase decisions for motherboards, so maybe Intel will start to listen if DPS & others start warning users of these things.

The warning could go like this. "You should be aware that although this motherboard is approved for use with our product, you may experience difficulty in obtaining memory chips for this motherboard because it will not work unless it uses approved memory & that approved memory may cost significantly more. You can find a list of Intel approved memory manufacturers & part numbers at http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/dk/DK_MEM.HTM  

If any of you can contribute feedback to me to help clarify why Intel would do this, I'd sure like to hear from you. I won't get my "approved" memory chips in until next week so I've effectively wasted a week I needed to catch up on my editing & I'm not feeling real happy about that & could stand to lose money because of it. I sure would feel a little better if we can warn others so they don't have to go through what I've just been through.

By Doug Hembruff.   

As a follow up note, I did manage to finally find one model of memory chip that isn't on the Intel approved list, but does seem to work. It is a Korean Goldstar LGS, GM72V661641CLT10K  9841.

Last updated Jan. 19/99