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Talk me out of buying an ES CPU with a ridiculous core count from ebay...

nismotigerwvu said:
ES chips are illegal to own and you could end up wasting money on a chip you can't keep.
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Yeah I know... its just... nobody cares. Not even Intel. They shut down a few sellers a couple of years back but tbh they don't seem too bothered about it.

Anyone have any technical reasons not to get one? Anyone had one and it randomly freezes/breaks etc?

Theres a lot on ebay that have an sspec starting with QH which is apparently the very first broadwell stepping... is it potentially really buggy because of this?
 
Realistically, looking at the benchmarks, the older multicore ES samples are not Skylake and an i7-6700k outperforms everything else in games and efficiency. How often do you really think that you are going to be doing video encodes or whatever that would justify an otherwise slower 140W CPU?
 
I just wouldn't chance it..Intel could call the police on you for stolen property and then the police could come and confiscate your whole system and you would never get it back so all that money could get thrown away.Besides like I said the ES CPU's I bought in the past wouldn't work in any motherboard and I never did get my money back for that so either way you could lose money or end up with broke crap. If you are in need of something cheap then buy used parts or low end stuff till you can afford better. Would you mind me asking what CPU it is you are so desperate for that it has to be en ES CPU?
 
illegal to own but i had a few all worked for me and i havent seen intel showing up for them . if they do they are long gone by now. you take the risk thats all you do if its worth it to you then do what you feel is right
 
It's highly unlikely Intel will come after you. If they wanted to shut it down they would be shutting down the sellers on ebay, but it seems like they are ok. I've seen posts from Intel people on forums recommending against their purchase and warning that they are unsupported, but no threats towards users.

However, the danger is, especially with earlier ES versions, is that they may have bugs and/or missing functionality that could range from mild to serious (I.e. Issues with certain computations or instability). I wouldn't trust them with any job essential to your work. QS (qualification samples) are often much safer since they are much closer to the release version but even still there can be problems... After all, it isn't uncommon for early versions of retail processors to have bugs. Probably safest to get used retail Xeons.
 
strategyfreak said:
It's highly unlikely Intel will come after you. If they wanted to shut it down they would be shutting down the sellers on ebay, but it seems like they are ok. I've seen posts from Intel people on forums recommending against their purchase and warning that they are unsupported, but no threats towards users.

However, the danger is, especially with earlier ES versions, is that they may have bugs and/or missing functionality that could range from mild to serious (I.e. Issues with certain computations or instability). I wouldn't trust them with any job essential to your work. QS (qualification samples) are often much safer since they are much closer to the release version but even still there can be problems... After all, it isn't uncommon for early versions of retail processors to have bugs. Probably safest to get used retail Xeons.
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Yeah agreed. It looks like Asus/Gigabyte block the early stepping chips as well, only chips with a retail stepping are guaranteed to work on their X99 boards. Asrock don't seem to care for now though.

Ive seen a few QS chips. Also a few ES but have the same stepping as the retail release chips, so they should work on any board. The majority on the bay look to be early broadwell samples (QHxx) or earlyish haswell samples (QExx and under).
 
You'll have to be very careful which motherboard and BIOS version you use unless it's a release stepping. It's handy to have a low end production chip for BIOS flashing and testing.

Most of these ES chips are salvaged from e-scrap, so be sure to inspect it for damage before using it.
 
andy2000 said:
You'll have to be very careful which motherboard and BIOS version you use unless it's a release stepping. It's handy to have a low end production chip for BIOS flashing and testing.

Most of these ES chips are salvaged from e-scrap, so be sure to inspect it for damage before using it.
Click to expand...

Id jump on that 20 core ES on ebay if I could afford to have issues with it... I cant right now though.

Found an OEM 14 core for ~£60 more than the ES were going for. Jumped on that.

Ill upgrade to 20 core later 😀
 
~£60 for 14 cores? That's ridiculously cheap! If my workloads were well-threaded I would jump on that at once. Even if the frequency is in the mid 2GHz range its throughput is still monstrous compared to consumer stuff. It's probably on par with the 6950X
 
Lepton87 said:
~£60 for 14 cores? That's ridiculously cheap! If my workloads were well-threaded I would jump on that at once. Even if the frequency is in the mid 2GHz range its throughput is still monstrous compared to consumer stuff. It's probably on par with the 6950X
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Nah £60 more than the engineering samples saw. £260 total.

The cheapest I saw was £130 for ~12 slow cores. £189 for 14. These are broadwell chips as well. The catch is they are early engineering samples. All had an sspec starting with QHxx which are the first broadwell ES chips, QKxx is close to retail. So the QH chips might not work on some boards or have may have other issues, missing features, most dont turbo as high as retail.

Good bargain if you do research and google the particular model to see if anyone else has had decent luck with it.
 
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