Motherboards and Buses - Upgrading and Repairing PCs - page 240

Just a few weeks after the 6x chipsets were released, there was a minor problem found
with the 3Gbps SATA ports in the B2 and earlier steppings. Due to a voltage and internal
current leakage problem, the ports could degrade over time, eventually causing read er-
rors. This problem did not affect the 6Gbps SATA ports, so one workaround was to only
connect drives to those ports. Intel quickly issued a recall, as did all motherboard and sys-
temmanufacturersthathadsoldmotherboardswiththeaffectedB2stepchips.Intelbegan
shipping fixed B3 stepping chipsets to motherboard manufacturers in February 2011, and
newmotherboardswiththefixedchipsetswereonthemarketbyApril2011.Anymother-
boards or systems sold after that date should be unaffected by this problem.
Third-Party Chipsets for Intel Processors
Over the years, SiS, ULi (now part of NVIDIA), ATI (now part of AMD), and VIA have
produced chipsets for Intel processors. The following sections discuss some of the more
popular versions of these chipsets by vendor.
SiS Chipsets
SiSofferedseveralchipsetsforIntelprocessors,includingintegratedchipsets,chipsetsfor
use with discrete video accelerator cards, and some that support Rambus RDRAM. SiS
chipsets for the Pentium 4 and Pentium D use one of several high-speed South Bridge
equivalents (SiS 96x series Media I/O chips) instead of integrating North and South
Bridge functions into a single chip. SiS North and South Bridge chips for the Pentium 4
and Pentium D use a high-speed 16-bit connection known as MuTIOL (Multi-Threaded
I/O Link) instead of the slow PCI bus as with older chipsets.
Formore information about SiSchipsets made forthe Pentium 4andPentium D,see “ SiS
Chipsets ,” in Chapter 4 , “ Motherboards and Buses ,” of Upgrading and Repairing PCs,
19 th edition, found in its entirety on the DVD packaged with this topic.
ULi Electronics Chipsets
ULiElectronics(formerlyknownasALiCorporationandAcerLaboratories,andlaterac-
quired by NVIDIA) has produced several chipsets for the Pentium 4 and Celeron 4 pro-
cessors, such as the Aladdin P4 and the M168x series. ULi also produced several South
Bridge chips in the M15xx series for the Pentium 4 as well as AMD Athlon XP and Ath-
lon 64 processors.
For more information about ULi (ALi) chipsets made for the Pentium 4, see “ ULi Elec-
tronics Chipsets , ” in Chapter 4 , “ Motherboards and Buses , ” of Upgrading and Repairing
PCs, 19 th edition, found in its entirety on the DVD packaged with this topic.