ECS Readies to Start Shipping Revised B3 Stepping Sandy Bridge Motherboards

After Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, ECS has also announced that it will restart shipping Intel 6 series motherboards based on the B3 revision of the Cougar Point chipset that fixed all the issues encountered by the Santa Clara-based company with the 3Gbps SATA ports.

The new motherboards can be distinguished from the older models with the help of a few visual cues that have been placed by ECS on both the motherboard's box and on its printed circuit board (PCB).

As you can clearly see from the pictures enclosed bellow, the ECS sticker clearly reads B3 stepping, and should be quite easy to spot even if you don't know what to look for.

On January 31, Intel has identified a design issue of the 6-series B2 chipset which forced ECS, as well as all the other LGA 1155 motherboard vendors, to retire their 6 series models from the market.

The bug, which affected the Cougar Point PCH, could, over time, degrade the performance of the four SATA 3Gbps ports driven by Intel's chipset, eventually leading to the failure of these ports.

At the heart of the problem is one of the transistors in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree that was provided with too high of a voltage, resulting a leakage current which, over time, can cause the failure of the 3Gbps ports.

To correct this problem, Intel has started the fabrication of a new revision of the Cougar Point chipset, identified with the B3 stepping.

Soon after, ECS announced that users who bought Sandy Bridge motherboards affected by this bug could exchange their products at the original place of purchase, once the B3 revision boards become available.

A list of motherboard models affected by this issue as well as more detailed replacement instructions are available on ECS' website (follow this link). (via Legit Reviews)