Intel Core i7-3960X and i7-3930K Make Appearance in UK Retail

Not so much time has left until Intel plans to make official its first processors based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture and these chips have already started to become available for pre-order from various retailers, the latest country to get them being UK.

Both of these CPUs were spotted by Hexus in on the Website of an unnamed e-tailer which has listed the Core i7-3930K for £477.59 (557,64 EUR or $766 US), while the Core i7-3960X is available for pre-order for a whopping £850.79 (993 EUR or $1,365 US).

As I'm sure that most of you have noticed, these prices are a great deal higher than those that have been rumored previously, but this isn't all that unusual to happen with unreleased products.

Just as its name implies, the Core i7-3960X is the fastest of the two CPUs Intel will launch in mid-November, the X at the end of its designation informing us that it belongs in the company's Extreme Edition line.

This processor packs six computing cores with Hyper-Threading support, has a base frequency of 3.30GHz and a maximum clock speed of 3.9GHz, and the cores are paired with 15MB of Level 3 cache memory.

The second chip, the Core i7-3930K, also includes six processing cores with Hyper-Threading support, but has a base operating clock of 3.2GHz, while the maximum frequency in Turbo mode is set at 3.80GHz.

Unlike its older brother, the Intel Core i7-3930K sports only 12MB of Level 3 cache memory.

The Core i7-3820, which Intel was expected to release together with the two SKUs detailed above, wasn't listed by the retailer which seems to confirm the rumors that state this won't actually arrive until February of 2012.

All the processors are compatible with motherboards using the LGA 2011 socket and feature support for quad-channel memory.