Intel Support / Returns not as good as they use to be?

I'd like to hear your feedback on the quality of support you have received from Intel recently? I had to return one of my Intel DH67CF Mini ITX media boards as it just quit and died. There was a three year warranty on the board and mine was well within its warranty period. I contacted Intel support and they went through a few diagnostic things and at the end they raised an RMA and told me to contact DHL to arrange for it to be sent back to them.

Four or five days later a "refurbished" replacement motherboard arrives back here. The motherboard worked OK with my HTPC after I resolved an issue with a short, however the board was physically damaged two of the RAM slot clips and parts of the actual blue plastic slots had been smashed right off. I hadn't done this so I wondered if it got damaged in the post, however looking in the bottom of the bag and in the box there were no plastic parts to be found, so Intel must have sent me the replacement board in this condition to begin with, see photo.



I contacted their support again and sent them said photo and explained the situation, I was told that shouldn't have happened and they raised a second RMA for me to send the replacement board back to them and for me to get yet another one.

So a few days ago the second replacement board arrives, however this board does not work and has an obvious problem with the video sub-system, see the YouTube video below. I have tried this second replacement board with two different known to be working power supplies and with two different RAM chips. I've tried two different HDMI cables one brand new. I have tested the board in and outside of the chassis and no matter what I try the video corruption fault exists, I either get fuzzy static on the screen or rapidly flashing colours or blank black screens or horizontal bars with glitching graphics.

I am not using a PCI graphics card just the on-chip Intel HD2000 graphics. I am using a second generation Intel i3 CPU and that is the only thing I have not swapped out as I haven't got another one handy, but the CPU worked OK with the last board.

So I reported all of this back to Intel support today and now they are trying to fob me off and are blaming my power supplies and saying they are not supported. The power supplies I have tried to use are a Corsair HX620W full ATX PSU and a genuine PicoPSU 150W with the DC power brick which are both brand new. I have used this particular and many other HTPC's with PicoPSU's and these Intel boards for years with no issues.

Sounds like a load of bull so they can void my warranty and do me out of a working replacement board, so I’m not very happy with Intel customer service at the moment. Think I will contact their UK head office if its not sorted out. Plus its all the time I have wasted with these replacement boards, I’ve been messing with this PC all day today.

Let me know if you have had any similar recent experiences with Intel?

UPDATE: The third replacement motherboard from Intel is a winner! Everything is working again now and I have my HTPC back up and running. Only issue was when using the PicoPSU 150W when the PC is turned off S5 Shutdown for some reason the CPU fan remains spinning. When using the full sized Corsair ATX PSU the CPU fan turns off OK. As this is a fanless chassis anyway's and the PC is actually being turned off to S5 Shutdown I've built the PC as is and seems to be working fine at the moment.

I even fixed the problem with the Inteset CIR board in Linux / OpenElec and it not turning on the PC from S3 or S5. 

OrigenAE M10 Mini-ITX HTPC Build

Quick post today looking at a new HTPC Build I just did. I plan to install Ubuntu Minimal and XBMC !

HTPC Case – OrigenAE M10
Motherboard - Intel DH67CF
CPU – Intel 2nd Generation Core i3-2100
Aftermarket Cooler – Akasa K25
Zalman Fan Mate 2
RAM - Corsair 4GB DDR3
SSD – Crucial 64GB M4
Blu-ray ROM – Sony BC-5650H (On its way from Hong Kong)

OrigenAE M10 case – this particular case has a right of centre eject button for the optical drive, I’ve seen some of these cases where the button is on the left, so make sure you get the right slot loading optical drive which is easier said than done. I can’t seem to source any new slot loading Blu-ray drives in the UK, they are either second hand or refurbished. So I have a new one coming from Hong Kong thanks to my Chinese friend I know who is sending me one.

It also has the VF310 SoundGraph VFD/IR display, which I have read is extremely difficult to get working under Linux, unlike the VF210 version of it. Not looking forward to that!





I read that the rear intake fan was a little noisy running at full speed, so I bought a Zalman Fan Mate 2 to I can slow down the speed of this fan and make it quieter! If I still lived in a hot country I wouldn’t do this.







There is no doubt that the OrigenAE M10 is the original beautiful looking Mini-ITX HTPC case and I have always fancied having one, but the internal layout is a bit of a let down and could have been done better, you can only install one 2.5” SSD drive and it screws to the side of the case as shown in the next three pictures.



Outside of the case (Lid off) looking in at the SSD.





Cases some in Black or Silver.



PICO PSU and External Power Brick are supplied with the case.



External power brick next to a Harmony remote.



Rear connections and ports on the Intel motherboard, you can also install a low profile PCI-E card.



Installing the Mini-ITX Motherboard



I’m sure the stock CPU coolers are decent these days but old habits die hard, so I opted for an Aftermarket Akasa low profile cooler.



It spins quite slowly and I can hardly hear it. I am only using the Zalman Fan Mate 2 on the rear chassis fan and they recommend you be careful if using them on a CPU fan for obvious reasons if its set too low and not doing its job properly cooling the chip. 

You can see I have the single Corsair 4GB RAM chip installed as well now.



This is interesting, don't think I have seen this before, the circuit board you can see in the below picture is for the SoundGraph VRD, there is a switch on it, the default position is SoundGraph, the other says Philips. There is also a pin connector which says Philips IR, I am guessing if you don’t want to use the SoundGraph IR receiver you can set it to Philips and use a standard internal IR receiver board. Not sure where the IR window is, presuming its built in to the LCD Display some where.





Optical drive bay now installed, but I have no optical drive at the moment to put in to it. If you look at the bottom right you can see the circuit board for the front power switch arrangement.





I had to put on the Power LED cable the other way round as to what is shown in the Intel motherboard diagram, reversed the pins – / + etc.



After realising my TV was on the wrong HDMI input and a brief panic, I was then able to see the boot screens and get in to the BIOS.



Quick Summary

Very nice, good build quality and great looking Mini-ITX HTPC case. If you want this style of chassis with an LCD display then this is probably the one to go for, budget allowing. If your not bothered about an LCD I would recommend a fanless solution like the Streacom FC8. The OrigenAE M10 came with one of those daft iMon Pad remotes, would like to see it shipped with a decent MCE remote. Internal design around the optical drive bay could be better, you are limited to what types of slot loading drives you can use, due to button position and mechanism and I think they could have made it so you could install two 2.5” hard drives.
Next I need to install an OS, I have decided to install Linux Ubuntu and XBMC with a view to migrating all my HTPC’s away from Windows 7 / MCE in the long term. Will let you know how that works out? As I am new to Linux so it could be a bit of a learning curve. So keep reading the blog to find out. Or leave a comment if you have recently moved away from MCE.

A look at the Luxa2 LM Series – HTPC Cases

Here we have two HTPC cases from Luxa2. On the bench today I have the LM 200 and LM 300 Pro models and the first thing you notice about these cases when viewing them in person is their size, they are massive and I mean big!

LM 300 Pro - Dimensions

Height:
203.5mm (8.01 inches) / food stand included: 218mm (8.58 inches)

Width:
460mm (18.11 inches)

Depth:
410mm (16.14 inches)

However they look like really expensive bits of kit. The finish is excellent in Aluminium and the build quality has an attention to detail.

They both have a IR/VFD display from Soundgraph with the usual Imon Pad remote control. There are some control buttons on the front of the case, however not all of which are really doing anything for me in Media Center at the moment, despite installing the latest Imon software, this is something I need to fix.

Volume Knob – Not currently working with Media Center

Start – Not currently working should take me to the Media Center start menu

Imedian – When pressing this button Media Center jumps between windowed and full screen mode

Menu – Does seem to do anything when pressed

App Exit - Does seem to do anything when pressed

The Up, Down, Left, Right arrows do work and I can navigate the Media Center menu’s also the Esc (Back) and Enter buttons are working.

There is a flip down panel on the front under the LCD display which hides the usual USB and card reader ports.

I love the way the optical drive cover slowly closes back up, after you have inserted a disk in to the optical drive.

One thing I don’t like about these chassis in that despite their large size you can only fit two 3.5” Hard disk drives. There is a simple metal shelf that runs inside the case and your two HDD’s and the Optical drive simply sit on top of this shelf. There are no drive bays and there is lots of wasted space inside the chassis that is not used, there is plenty of room to have 4 HDD’s but no provision has been made for doing so. This is the biggest problem with the Luxa2 IMHO.

Below are some photographs I took of these two models, click to enlarge.

Overall a nice HTPC chassis, large in size but a little short on internal HDD bays.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse”, Media Center”, Story”, HTPC CaseC Case”, Luxa2”

Guide to building a HD HTPC

If your current hardware knowledge and PC building skills are as bad as mine
which I very much doubt!

And when you built PC's on a regular basis, motherboards had
no USB ports and then when they did have USB ports no USB devices existed for two years, floppy disk drives were a must have feature and the latest
graphics cards where either Matrox or Diamond and if you had 128MB of RAM you
were lucky! That's what years of senior corporate I.T. management OEM buying power and
laziness gets you! Then this guide is going to be right up your street.

An extremely knowledgeable chap who goes by the name of Renethx over on the
AVS Forums has a fantastic guide for newbie's like me and seasoned PC builders alike.
Check it out here.
Warning there are 160 plus pages and it will make your head hurt if you read
too much, however the first 15 pages or so and for current specs page 85 onwards are the
essentials.

His HD HTPC build recommendations cover low end, mid range and high end, Intel / Intel, Intel / Nvidia, AMD / AMD and AMD / Nvidia chipsets, he
also covers building massive terabyte storage servers and home servers and high end workstations.

I think I'm gonna just choose one of this spec recommendations and build away when I have the spare cash that is!