Intel halt the production of Cougar Point chipset, and recalled all previous Cougar Point chipset due to the SATA chip issue, and expected these new Cougar Point chipsets with B3-stepping to be ready by April. But come March, and Taiwanese electronics giant Asus and MSI are already shipping their first batch of P67 and H67 motherboards with new Cougar Point B3-stepping chipsets to their distributors worldwide.

Though the availability of these new ‘fixed’ motherboards may vary from regions to regions, but it seemed that by mid of March most distributors of Asus and MSI will have stocks ready, which is about a month earlier than Intel’s timeline. Has Intel known of this issue much earlier than the time they announced and already has B3-stepping chipsets by the time of the recall announcement, or is it because only a small amount of early Cougar Points chipsets are affected, and can easily be filtered with certain methods and stricter QC?

Anyway, users can easily identify revised products by checking for labels showing “New B3 Revision” displayed on products and their packaging. The chipset version can also be verified through the onboard sticker, BIOS, ASUS SATA Verifier or CPUID’s CPU-Z utility. You may probably call the retailer to ask for replacement as early as next week.