Graydon wrote:
On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 09:53:08AM +0100, mike wilson scripsit: [snip]
Asking around, it seems that these sort of faults are quite common in
self build projects so it makes me think that the big box creators are
getting the 100% good stuff and all the rest goes to the retail parts
companies,
The big box creators -- Dell, HP, etc. -- get custom parts intensely
optimized for margin. At the consumer PC level, it's definitely *NOT*
the good stuff.
You need to buy self build parts either from some place that has high
sustained volume ( = they don't screw up their parts handling much) or
which charges a bit more and does lots of custom build work for picky
customers like architects and photographers ( = they're building their
business on a quality reputation, not low cost).
If you don't do that, generally what you've got is a part that's been
handled roughly, and that leads to the sort of cracked trace problem
that gives undiagnosable (without upwards of a quarter million dollars
in scopes, anyway) intermittent faults.
Bill and I aren't really having intermittent problems. My own feeling
(and it's nothing more than that) is that it's a luck-of-the-draw thing.
The motherboard is a complex concatenation of even more complex
subassemblies. We all know the possibly apochryphal story that all
processors come off the same assembly line and that it's only testing
that defines which has the fewest faults and is therefore the best. Put
two of those hyper-complex units together and you are bound to have a
huge range of interactive results (faults), many of which will have no
visible effect.
Put a number of them together in their own complex environment and,
personally, I think you are exceptionally lucky if there are absolutely
no visible problems. I would happily bet that, if you examined it
closely enough, anyone's computer would not match exactly the
manufacturer's specification.
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