Brits forced to wait for new Sandy Bridge PCs

Following news earlier this week that Intel has discovered some major design faults in the Intel 6 series chipsets, it looks like British consumers will have to wait a few extra months to buy their new Sandy Bridge-powered PCs.

It is a massive blow for the world's biggest chipmaker, which may well cost them anything up to a billion dollars.

However, British PC buyers are not going to be majorly affected by the fault, merely being forced to wait an extra month or two for their new PC.

Early adopters covered

If you have already invested in a Sandy Bridge-powered new PC, then the manufacturer will most definitely replace your motherboard, should it prove to be one of the few faulty ones identified by Intel.

If not, then our industry insiders suggest that you should just hang fire for a month or two before buying your new computer, until the Intel issue has been fully resolved.

"MSI has been informed by Intel about the potential design issues in the Intel 6 series chipsets," said John Inwood, marketing manager for MSI UK, when we asked him about the latest problem with Sandy Bridge.

"According to Intel the performance of some of the Intel SATA ports on Intel 6 series products can degrade over a period of three years.

"MSI takes the quality of our products very seriously, so at this moment we are investigating product batches that may be affected and, meanwhile, have stopped all shipments to our distributors and resellers," the MSI rep added.

It seems that there are no problems for British computer buyers to date with MSI's notebooks or all-in-one systems, with the MSI marketing manager adding:

"We are working closely with Intel to help identify this as soon as possible. For MSI notebook and all-in-one product lines, we can confirm that there are currently no products in the UK channel which are affected by this issue."

System integrators to suffer

System integrators such as Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, Packard Bell, Sony and others will certainly be the ones that suffer most from Intel's latest chip failure.

PC retailers such as Dixons group, for example, will have already bought up ship containers of thousands of ready-made PCs from these companies, which will now have turned around and be on their way back to the Far East to have the problematic chipset replaced before being returned to Europe.

Overall, the problem is little more than a minor inconvenience for British PC buyers and for companies such as Asus and MSI, who will now have to put back their marketing campaigns for Sandy Bridge PCs back to April/May time and assure the few thousands of early adopters that have already bought into the tech that replacements will be made available to them, if and when necessary.

TechRadar has contacted Asus, Dell and a number of other PC vendors for further comment on this story.