14 DAY TRIAL // After Asus and MSI, Gigabyte has also announced that it started shipping new revisions of its motherboards based on the B3 stepping of the Cougar Point chipset, the company expecting that the first boards will become available in the second week of March.
The new motherboard revisions have been renamed so that they can be easily distinguished from the older B2 versions and carry the ‘B3’ tag at the end of the model name.
For example, the GA-P67A-UD7 has been replaced by the GA-P67A-UD7-B3 and the GA-H67A-UD3H has been replaced by the GA-H67A-UD3H-B3.
In addition, the printed circuit board (PCB) has also been updated to reflect the name change, while the BIOS POST screen identifies the chipset as the B3 revision.
On January 31, Intel announced the detection of a design error in the new Sandy Bridge-based 6-series support chip, also known as Cougar Point.
The bug made its way into almost all Sandy Bridge products shipped until then and could lead, in time, to a slower performing system as it affected the speed of the four SATA II 3Gbps ports built into the chipset.
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 this, Gigabyte has announced that it plans to replace, or offer refunds, to all of its customers affected by this issue.
Furthermore, the company has released a tool which checks to see what SATA ports are used by the system and can also identify the revision of the chipset used by the board (in its latest version available here).
