Technical rapport
HEXUS brought you the news, earlier in the week, that high-end component maker Corsair was pulling some performance DDR3 modules due to an unacceptable failure rate in their Elpida Hyper ICs.
We subsequently discovered that a couple of Corsair's new PSUs have had their listed 80Plus energy efficiency rating changed from Gold to Silver.
So we thought it was time to get to the bottom of things and fired over a few questions to Corsair's vice president of marketing, Jim Carlton.
[HEXUS] Corsair has had a few ‘interesting' developments in the last few weeks. We've seen you announce a hold on the Dominator GT and your two new PSUs mysteriously switched from 80Plus Gold to 80Plus Silver. What's going on? Inquiring minds want to know! Let's start with the Dominator GT.
[Jim] Okay, but please be gentle. I've only had one cup of coffee this morning.
[HEXUS] So why did the Elpida issue initially go undetected?
[Jim] First, I'd like to make sure that we clarify exactly what's behind the production hold on the Dominator GT. This is not a general Elpida problem-they make a lot of quality memory ICs. What we've seen is a higher-than-expected field failure rate with our Elpida Hyper-based Dominator GT modules. This is something the enthusiast community started to see a while ago, but we weren't sure at first if it wasn't just related to the fact that most of them were pushing them as hard as possible, upping voltages and clock dividers, pouring liquid nitrogen or liquid helium on them and so on.
Even though our modules have been shipping for a few months, the types of failures and the relatively low levels statistically speaking have meant that we could only recently properly characterize the failure rate. Because modules using Elpida Hyper ICs were found to have unacceptably high failure rates, we decided to take a pretty unusual step and put production of these parts on hold until we could find a solution.
We're working closely with Elpida engineers to isolate and correct the problem so we can get back into production as soon as possible.