14 DAY TRIAL // Now that the flawed Intel chipset crisis is more or less behind us, Intel's various partners are once again launching and selling PC products powered by it, with ASUS and Gigabyte apparently being especially active.
People have likely not yet forgotten about the very unfortunate development involving the 6-series Cougar point chipset from Intel.
Basically, the platform had a design flaw that caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade over time, essentially affecting motherboard and notebook functionality.
Virtually all such PC products were halted and recalled, but B3 stepping chipsets have since been released.
That said, Intel's many partners are again selling Sandy Bridge products, and it appears that ASUS and Gigabyte are two of the more active companies of this sort.
As reported by Digitmes, they are both selling quite a few notebooks powered by it, in addition to all-in-one PCs.
Gigabyte has the 15.6-inch P2532 laptop, which should start selling sometime this month (March 2011).
ASUS has the CG8350, its so-called flagship, based on an Intel Core i7-2600 chip and equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 discrete graphics card. This machine also has 6 GB of DDR3 memory.
CG8350 will sell for NT$46,900 (the equivalent of US$1,597) and will be accompanies by the CM6650, which boasts the Core i5-2300 CPU as the main piece, plus a price of NT$17,900-26,900.
Among other things, the laptop relies on 4 GB of memory and SATA 6 Gbps. It also has the benefit of USB 3.0 support.
As for the All-in-One, it uses the Core i5-2400 and measures 23.6 inches, its name being of ET2400 IGTS. The price is of NT$40,000 and USB 3.0 is present.
These offerings on the part of ASUS and Gigabyte just have to get a strong enough following to face off against rival inventions from HP, Acer, Toshiba and all other PC suppliers.