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. 

Intel DH55TC motherboard – True-HD & DTS-HD audio as standard!

I’ve been testing out a new HTPC platform recently, based around the Intel DH55TC motherboard and an Intel i3-530 Clarkdale processor.

I’ve not had much time to really grill this machine fully, but my initial thoughts are its pretty good. MKV and Blu-ray playback is nice and smooth in Windows Media Center / PowerDVD 9 and for the first time I am now able to bit-stream True-HD and DTS-HD audio to the AVR in this case an Onkyo TX SR606.

The whole computer feels faster and more responsive, My Movies Collection Manager is certainly quicker and the Media Center user interface also feels a bit snappier.

There was one main setting I had to change in PowerDVD 9 for the bit-streaming of True-HD and DTS-HD audio to kick in. I am also using the latest version of the Shark007 codec pack (2.4.8) with FFDShow DXVA settings, I might cover my latest shark configuration in more details in another blog post, however I did touch on it here

I had to turn on this setting in PowerDVD9 within MCE - “Non-decoded high definition audio to external device”

I tested two Blu-ray movies which were ripped ISO images on the hard drive, Total Recall which has a DTS-HD soundtrack and The Dark Knight which has a Dolby True-HD soundtrack. I am using Virtual Clone Drive beta 5.4.4.0 which My Movies (3.13) uses to mount the Blu-ray disc images.

Screen shots from PowerDVD 9 – Show Information.

Now this is what I always like to see on the AVR displays!

I definitely need to do some more testing with this new HTPC build and let it bed in a bit, but I think this new Intel platform has really impressed me so far.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse , MediaCenter , Intel , Clarkdale , True-HD , DTS-HD , bitstreaming

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