I am going to very quickly summarise the next problem I have had with my motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 in this post, because it has got to the point that I can't take much more of it.
Firstly, my previous computer, better known as the Platypus (which I dearly loved, but sold most of it to a fellow computer enthusiast) was a marvelous computer. It had no problems, it was simply because I had read about Intel's Sandy Bridge being so incredibly good for video editing, which I was certainly doing a lot of at the time, that made me want to buy one for myself.
So the Platypus left and the new computer, better known as the Zebra (both are named after animals named after their chipsets: P45 and Z68, although the Zebra is also black and white) took its place. The Zebra was built with an incredibly cheap-to-build system, as most of the components from the Platypus that were expensive were able to be kept and reused. The Zebra cost around £575 (£100 to the motherboard, £50 to the RAM, £250 to the CPU and £175 to the case) which to me seemed great, but it was terribly flawed.
Now I loved it when I first got it, and still love it now, but it's breaking my heart more and more these days (or maybe just really annoying me I suppose). Here's exactly why:
It started off with the motherboard having a device that seemed to be unknown to the computer. So I disconnected everything and noticed it was still there. Next I decided to plug a USB flash drive into each USB port, and there we go, problem solved. One of the rear USB2.0 ports was not working. I complained to Gigabyte, who seemingly did nothing to help apart from say that my chipset was incorrectly installed, which makes no sense anyway. I filled a complaint and tried to get it sorted under warranty. But it was too much effort after assembling the computer, that I decided to leave it, as it was just one USB2.0 port, and Gigabyte themselves even said that they would not pick it up.
It now suffers from another problem: a device that plugs in and then unplugs a second or two later. Listening to the Windows 7 device connected (dum dum) then immediately after the Windows 7 device disconnected (bum bum) was driving me mad. I could not bare it any more. I muted removed the sound from Windows sound manager in Control Panel.
I have decided when I can, I'm going to sell the motherboard and get a new one for my birthday, when Haswell will be well and truly ready. I will probably sell the CPU as well.
