Gigabyte and MSI halt sales of Sandy Bridge motherboards

 As discovered yesterday, manufacturers, distributors and retailers were all thrown into disarray thanks to the speediness of Intel’s announcement  that the company had found flaws in its new 6 series chipsets, which came only a week after the problem with the chipset’s SATA 3Gbps controller was indentified.

It does seem that some manufacturers were given a heads up shortly before the announcement, but even in those cases it was taking time to formulate a response. Meanwhile, a large number of the technology industry was on holidays for Chinese New Year.

Despite the fact that Intel has guaranteed that money will be set aside to fund the replacement of those chipsets that have already been shipped, the onus is on the component and system manufacturers to actually replace the products. This has meant that a mad scramble has been going on behind the scenes to formulate, and then inform distribution and the general public about what will happen.

So far we have heard from a handful of motherboard makers about their plans to deal with the situation. It is important to note that the bug in question is one that will manifest over a long period of time, so continuing to use P67 or H67 motherboards until replacements are available in April should not be an issue. 

Gigabyte has asked its distributors and resellers to stop selling any P67 and H67 chipset motherboards and is getting all unsold products returned. It is also promising that it will replace any motherboards sold so far once it receives the new stock from Intel (likely to be in April).

MSI has stopped shipping 6 series products to distributors and retail. It has also “asked resellers to hold sales of the Intel 6 series based MSI products to customers until the issue can be resolved”.  MSI is working with Intel to work out a solution for customers who have already purchased its motherboards, but for now there are no details on how or when fixed products will be available.

ASUS is currently talking with its distributors and said it should have an idea of the plan of action by the close of business today.