Last week we first learned about a bug affecting the Intel Skylake platform. The bug was brought to our attention, and Intel's, by a team of mathematicians who devote a lot of time and effort in hunting down prime numbers. The Mersenne Community noted, in an Intel community posting, that a bug in Skylake was precipitating system freezing and crashing when tasked with certain "complex workloads".

Today I received an email from MSI stating that it has already addressed the issue in a number of motherboards with its full roster of Skylake motherboards lined up to receive the update in due course.

MSI wrote to say that the bug would very rarely affect day-to-day users but had been "confirmed by our in-house team". The firm appears worried that users might shy away from Intel's latest-and-greatest architecture and the benefits it brings, so has acted swiftly to address the freezing issue with Intel's help and hopes to "reassure potential buyers of MSI boards that it’s not an issue now".

So late last week MSI made the update to fix the aforementioned bug available for owners of the Z170A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM and Z170A GAMING M7 motherboards. These users can drop by and pick up an updated beta BIOS from MSI right away from the firm's OneDrive account at this link (zip files). Other users are assured that the same fix will be coming to the full MSI Skylake motherboard range and they will appear, as normal, on the MSI website in due course.

If you have one of MSI's Skylake motherboards but haven't experienced any issues with your system it might be worth waiting for a non-beta BIOS to become available before considering going ahead and doing this kind of update.