Intel Ivy Bridge E/EP Engineering Sample Procesor on Ebay

Owners of Intel X79 Express Chipset based motherboards are starting to get excited about Intel Core i7 “Ivy Bridge-E” processors that are slated for release in Q3-2013 according to the rumor mill. These processors are said to be compatible with existing socket LGA2011 motherboards after a BIOS update, which is great news! The new IVy Bridge-E processors are said to introduce IPC improvements, PCI-Express Gen 3.0 certified root complex (one which NVIDIA will approve of), higher CPU core clock speeds, and support for faster memory. Let’s just hope that Intel uses fluxless solder on the integrated heat spreader and not thermal paste! If you can’t wait half a year for the new processors to come out we ran across what appears to be an Intel Ivy Bridge-E processor on Ebay for $166.50 plus shipping! The Ebay seller appears to have a whole tray and the Q-Spec code on the processor for sale is Q1DF and it is clearly an early engineering sample. He claims that it fits in his LGA2011 board, but won’t boot. The question now is what, if any, motherboards have a BIOS available for these early ES processors!