14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's recently discovered SATA bug, which affects all of its Cougar Point motherboards, has managed to cause quite a stir in the computing industry, forcing many manufacturers to suspend their desktop and laptop shipments until the B3 stepping of the 6-series PCH becomes available, but Maingear managed to find a workaround to this problem, enabling the company to dispatch Sandy Bridge desktops yet again.
The workaround makes use of an add-in SATA card which provides dual SATA II ports and dual SATA I ports, enabling users to connect the same number of storage devices as the Cougar Point chipset.
“The Vybe Super Stock, F131 Stock, and F131 Super Stock are now all shipping within 10 days.
“We’ve worked with Asus to work around the Cougar Point chipset issue and provide our customers with discrete SATA controllers to ensure that expansion beyond the unaffected SATA III ports is possible.
“Customers who want Sandy Bridge immediately can be assured that these configurations will not suffer from the defect in the Cougar Point chipset.
“Maingear will be utilizing the SATA 6G ports 0 and 1 and will be offering a free discrete SATA controller to enable further expansion in the future,” reads the company's press release regarding this issue.
The SATA problems experienced by Cougar Point came to light on January 31 when Intel released a notice regarding a bug that affected almost all Sandy Bridge motherboards shipped until then.
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 disabled this transistor all together, but this requires the fabrication of a new revision of the Cougar Point chipset, identified with the B3 stepping.
An article detailing how to see if your Sandy Bridge motherboard is affected by the issue is available here.