Building A New PC? Intel's Motherboard Woes Have Been Resolved

Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011


I’m in the middle of building a new desktop computer, and for the last couple weeks have been frustrated by the recall of Intel’s new P67 (Sandy Bridge-supporting) motherboards, since those are exactly what value-conscious buyers like myself would be going for. Well, the wait is over — the replacements have arrived. It’s safe to build!

The old boards had a bug causing some of the SATA ports to malfunction and potentially lose data. The new boards have an additional designation, B3 stepping, usually denoted as “B3″ or “Rev 3″ in the title of the board. So if you were looking at a MSI P67A-GD65, it’ll be the P67A-GD65-B3 now.

Yeah, it’s not like all these parts needed any more numbers and letters on the end, but at least you know what to look out for.

I was actually going to pull the trigger on my system last night (GD65, 6950, 2500K) but I’ve decided to wait and see about the new Intel 320 series of SSDs for a fast system disk. I’m pumped, got a whole back library of PC games to play.