14 DAY TRIAL // The now infamous design flaw plaguing Intel's newest chipset seems to finally be getting surpassed, as Micro-Star International has added its name to the list of IT players shipping fixed motherboards.
The beginning of the ongoing year seems to have been packed full of unexpected developments, even one that left Intel with a real mess to clean up.
Quite a bit of time before Advanced Micro Devices decided to offer money back to some of its customers, Intel got landed with a real problem.
Basically, the Santa Clara, California-based CPU maker discovered that the Cougar Point 6 Series chipset had a nasty flaw that caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade.
Fortunately, the problem has already been corrected by the chip maker, but though shipments of the B3 stepping are underway, it will take a while before the flow of mainboards and notebooks recovers.
Nevertheless, some companies have already put the B3 stepping to good use, like iBuyPower, among others.
Now, MSI has revealed that it updated the H67 and P67 chipset-based platforms and has already begun sending them out of its factories.
They can be identified by the "MSI B3 Stepping Ready" sticker and will have B3 branding as part of their retail boxes and product codes.
Meanwhile, those customers that already have a flawed mainboard can check to see which SATA ports are or are not affected by the issue with the SATA Verifier utility.
Furthermore, once MSI manages to raise a large enough supply of motherboards, it will be ready to start replacing worldwide sold products.
Customers based in the UK should get a chance to do this soon, but the company failed to say exactly when or how this will be accomplished.
Either way, what remains is for March to bring about the availability of fixed notebooks and for the rest of the supply chain to be restored to its usual state by April.