Sandy Bridge-EP CPU hits Ebay, can be yours!

I missed this kind of Intel ES leaking to Ebay! Now the only thing left is finding that precious X79 mainboard!

Link to ebay: Intel i7 8 core ES Q19D Sandy Bridge platsburg chipset

We're still at least four to five months from Intel's launch of the Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon series of processors, but if you have enough cash to spare, you can own one today. The CPU was listed on Ebay earlier today and judging by the pictures and details posted by the seller; this is the real genuine deal.

The CPU is of course an Engineering Sample or ES CPU as they're also known as and it's not intended for general usage. That said, what we appear to be looking at here is a Xeon E5-4600 or E5-2600 series CPU. Why? Well, simply because it's an LGA-2011 part and these CPUs will end up in one or the other Xeon family depending on how many sockets the CPU supports (4600 series for quad socket, 2600 series for dual socket). The seller on the other hand seems to think he's got a Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU for the X79 chipset, but this isn't likely to be case here.

The CPU is labelled Q19D ES 1.60GHz which is again speaking volumes for this being a Xeon CPU rather than a high-end consumer desktop part. The information provided by the seller claims that this is an 8 core 16 thread part and the same seller has offered a similar model, Q19J which is also a 1.6GHz part, but presumably with 6 cores and 12 threads. The Q19J part is said to have 15MB L3 cache which sounds about right, although we're not sure if these CPUs are for dual or quad socket systems.

The 8 core CPU is listed for US$1,359.99 (S$1,675) while oddly enough the 6 core CPU was listed for US$1,699.99 (S$2,093), a steep price indeed for both of them. Either CPU will of course also need a motherboard based on the C600 series chipset (also known as Patsburg) to work properly, something that we're not likely to see until Computex at the end of this month.