14 DAY TRIAL // If you got tired of reading all sorts of news about Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processor, then what would you say about actually buying one of these and seeing for yourself what kind of performances you should expect from these chips, a Taiwanese seller listing eight Intel Core i7-2600K processors on his eBay page.
Listed as new items, the processors are priced at US $699.99 for a unit, probably more than what Intel will charge for them once they finally make it to retail, although this is definitely a good deal if you don't feel like waiting until January 5.
As far as processors go, the buyer as well as the images posted seem legit, the processor pictured being marked as an engineering sample and clocked at 3.4GHz, the buyer stating this is a D1 stepping Core i7 2600K.
At 3.4GHz, the Core i7 2600K is the fastest Sandy Bridge processor in Intel's lineup and comes with four processing cores, 8MB of L3 cache, integrated graphics and HyperThreading technology.
Furthermore, the chips frequency can go as high as 3.8GHz when in Turbo Boost mode, the processor automatically adjusting its frequency depending on the number of threads the workload being run uses.
As part of the K series, the Core i7 2600K features an unlocked multiplier, a must have for all the overclockers out there considering the Sandy Bridge architecture comes with a locked base clock generator that doesn't allow users to change the BLCK frequency.
According to some early reviews that made their way onto the web before Intel's NDA expired, the 2600K holds an impressive speed advantage over the Core i7 875K (2.93GHz for the 875K vs 3.4GHz for the 2600K) that helps making for quite an impressive performance speedup in a wide array of tasks.
Moving back to the 2600K listen on eBay, the buyer states all chips will be tested before delivery, the shipped package containing only the CPU without a heatsink. (via SemiAccurate).