As expected, motherboard manufacturers have begun receiving the newly fixed version of Intel's Cougar Point chipset and will soon start shipping their products to retailers. Among them, MSI appears to be one of the first to get the new B3-stepping parts not suffering from SATA degradation issues and the company claims it has already begun to repair and replace motherboards affected by the recall.
It's not immediately clear when supplies of B3-stepping boards will arrive on the market for new buyers, but the company has said it will mark them with the words "MSI B3 Stepping Ready" on the boxes to customers can easily distinguish new boards based on bug-free chips from the old ones.
It has been a busy few weeks for Intel following the recall. The company originally stopped shipments of all Cougar Point chipsets, but later changed course and allowed PC makers to sell hardware with the flawed chipsets provided they disabled the faulty SATA controllers. They also managed to fix the problem much faster than expected, and though it'll probably still be a few weeks until supply is back to normal, the impact of this problem will be limited.