PCW NEWSPRINT

Board maker admits to using dummy cache

A manufacturer has admitted selling motherboards with dummy cache which, it says, some dealers have sold as the real thing. Newsprint has been flooded with letters and calls from readers who discovered from last month's fake-cache story that their boards were not all they appeared to be.

Protac International Computers (PIC) said dummy cache was used for two reasons:

  1. To reassure buyers; empty slots make them feel a board is somehow incomplete.
  2. To avoid having to reprogram a production line each time it is switched from cached to cacheless boards. Marketing manager Steve Baxter said dummies saved around $100,000 a month.

They are all stamped "Writeback" to identify the boards as supporting the fast writeback strategy for using cache. But writeback operates only on the Level 1 cache inside the processor. The boards can support the larger external L2 chips, but have none on them - only dummies.

These are bought from a third party, and PIC is not the only supplier to use them. It claims to be one of the biggest board makers in the world, shifting 600,000 a month from plants in the Far East.

PIC said it never intended to "deceive or misinform" anyone. I suggested to Baxter that a court might nevertheless take the view that the dummies constituted misrepresentation. He believed PIC had acted within the law and said that it had volunteered information, which is more than other companies had done. "We are trying to be as open as possible," he said.

Baxter said that PIC had to warn only one dealer, for months, after the boards went on sale last year. He said in a letter: "Over the past few days we have become aware that some dealers are selling motherboards with dummy chips as '256Kb cache' boards, or sometimes as '256Kb writeback cache', when in reality they have zero external cache." The letter added: "There is a large price difference between the WB (Writeback) and 256Kb cache model and it is highly unlikely that a dealer is unaware of the true specification of either."

Full Protac Statement

Clive Akass
• News Analysis - page 36, PCW


NEWS ANALYSIS
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The truth, but not the whole truth

Newsprint has been flooded with calls from readers feeling ripped off over the fake cache scandal featured in last month's Newsprint. But there are still plenty of dodgy boards still on sale. Clive Akass reports.

The dummy cache scandal has emerged because, paradoxically, the chips in question are being used less. Many PCs are now sold without cache chips but with EDO (extended data out) RAM, which uses the clock cycles more efficiently to produce much the same performance as cached systems. So the fact that your board has no cache, or dummy cache, does not necessarily mean that you are losing out on performance (see box).

This trend created a demand for boards with no cache chips, and led to the decision by PIC and other companies to fill the empty slots with dummies. This decision was to say the least foolhardy.

It has led to many of the boards being sold on the basis of half-truths and downright deceit, leaving some vendors as well as many users feeling cheated. There are three levels of misrepresentation:

The PIC boards report "writeback enabled", which is the truth but not the whole truth. It means that the BIOS has turned on writeback operation of the main processor's internal cache. Graham Jackson, senior design consultant with chipmaker Cyrix, said this produces a marked performance improvement but nothing like that gained from using external cache as well.

He said: "I can think of absolutely no reason why anyone should use dummy chips on these boards. It is misleading and is bound to lead to trouble."

He said PIC had sent a fax about the nature of the writeback boards only the week before, and he had stopped putting '256Kb writeback' on invoices. "You ask 100 people what the terminology of writeback cache is and you'll get 100 different answers. Nobody knows," he said Basi claimed that he was offering to replace boards of people who complained. But computer consultant Glynn Lucas told PCW he met "a very violent reaction" when he returned one.

"They deliberately tried to rubbish me and had the cheek to claim that this cache was of a far higher quality. When I showed them that it was in fact false they refused to return my money and threatened to remove me by force."

Another reader, Mike Bennett, reported that dealers at a London computer fair last month were still claiming Writeback boards contained 250Kb of cache.

Opposite, Eclipse advertised boards fitted with processors, and only from the prices could you deduce that some of these lacked cache. I suggested to Eclipse proprietor Changez Akhter that the ads, while not actually lying, were less than honest. He replied: "If you are a manufacturer of a four-speed car you are not going to say that it has four gears. You are going to leave that out... You are going to highlight the good points."

He said Eclipse had never claimed, like Pino (whom he named), that boards had 256Kb of cache when they had not. "We assume everyone knows what writeback cache is," he said. When I asked him what he thought it meant, he replied: "Writeback cache means dummy cache on the board."

Some of the boards, part of the Elite series, had dummy cache actually soldered in, which Akhter admitted meant they were virtually impossible to upgrade.

Some dummy cache boards could be brought up to scratch by using EDO RAM, but many people buy them to upgrade a PC and reckon on using their old standard RAM. We had calls from readers whose 'upgraded' system ran slower than their old one.

Trading standards in at least three counties are investigating complaints about false cache.

Thanks to all of you who contacted us about dummy cache. I tried to answer you all but I was on overload at times. Keep the letters coming to Clive Akass.


Cache Crisis

These figures from NEC show the relative performance for three types of RAM: fast page (standard), EDO and synchronous DRAM. They are shown with no cache, SRAM as mimicked by the dummy chips, and pipeline burst which is an extra option on some of the high-end boards. The actual figures are:

Fast PageEDOS-RAM
No cache67.676.982.6
SRAM76.6(83)n/a
Pipeline88.590.992.2

You can see that EDO RAM alone is about as fast as standard RAM with SRAM cache. The figure for EDO with SRAM is estimated, as this is not a usual configuration. Pipeline is fastest in all cases. Synchronous DRAM has yet to appear in mainstream systems but is likely to become common next year, says NEC non-DRAM product manager Mike Hopkins. EDO prices are getting down to those of standard RAM.