>...Other FAQs written on random websites might be suspect because
> they're tracking down information about things themselves, but one
> would expect a manufacturer to be able to provide accurate information
> about their own product.
Lord Evermore,
Would you say the same thing if you were reading a FAQ on a Chaintech site? I mean, assuming it was intelligible?
Or, suppose you called the IRS about some tax question. Presumably the US government, the supreme authority, ought to know what its laws mean, even if no accountant, lawyer, or judge is completely certain.
Let's consider the chain of command. There is some web site programmer putting this all there. It is done on the orders of some supervisor. Neither of these know diddley about motherboards or even electronics. If the FAQ writing was done in a professional manner, as it may well have been at Intel, then the actual words were composed by a technical writer, who may understand these things, but he has no specific knowledge of what the engineering was, or what the BIOS programming was. Did he get the information from the engineers or programmers? Does he even have access to these people? Maybe he has read a lot of FAQs, like everybody on this forum, and thinks he knows, and so does not have to spend hours tracking down the actual designers and engineers who did the specifics, if he can even find out who they were, and if he is permitted to spend as much time as he sees fit writing up the FAQ.
Here's an example from me. I have a couple of old motherboards which I have decided to max out on memory, since SDRAM is so cheap and the max is so low. So the manuals of these two completely disimilar mobos (Intel TX vs VIA MVP3) say they take maximum size 128M DIMM modules. So does the memory selector on the Crucial site. For the heck of it, I try 256M modules. (I didn't have a lot of 128s.) Both mobos work perfectly with 256M modules, recognizing and reporting every bit. Memtest says all is well. One mobo is maxxed at 256M, the other with 384M = 256M + 128M. Maybe later BIOS revisions put this capability in. (OTOH, the newest 128M I have is only recognized as 64M.) So much for the authorities. BTW, this not the first time -by far- in my experience that the authorities were not authoritative. Usually it works against me though.