Do Gigabyte and Asus err... Foxconn, Pegatron, Quanta, et al. own enough equipment to do the desoldering, cleaning, soldering, and X-ray inspections necessary to do this work at a reasonable rate? I doubt that the actual board manufacturers like Foxconn do very much desoldering and other types of rework on a large scale in their normal manufacturing operations. Next, if the manufacturers must look outside their companies, is there enough equipment out there up to the task of reworking these boards at a reasonable cost and rate? Next, is the cost of reworking a board less than the cost of scrapping and recycling the bad boards and building an entirely new board and taking whatever refund Intel offers? I realize that while Intel will replace the bad chips, if Intel is willing or Intel can be made to be willing to foot the cost of manufacturing an entirely new board, why rework these boards with defective chipsets? Maybe even the manufacturers could weasel some lower prices on the 6 series chipsets. It isn't like the 6 series chipsets are much more than an ICH9 southbridge with PCIe 5Gb/s links as opposed to the 2.5Gb/s links found in older chipsets. For that matter, Sandy Bridge should have required a new socket or even an Intel chipset, aside from the DMI bus used to connect to the processor having potentially slightly different software protocols that PCIe.
Heck, the AMD SB850, which is several months older than the Intel 6 series of chips has links electrically identical to PCIe that run at 5Gb/s and hypothetically could be made to work with Sandy Bridge. The SB850 also has six 6Gb/s SATA ports instead of the half-assed SATA setup Intel uses.
