14 DAY TRIAL // We've been talking about the upcoming Intel Ivy Bridge central processing units, and how their motherboards won't make it easy to use three displays with them.
Now, though, we've come across some information that will surely make the day of people interested in getting one of the CPUs early.
According to CPU World, some unreleased Ivy Bridge processors are up on eBay.
Not only that, but some Chinese sites still have some listings up.
This goes to show that someone somehow got some engineering samples and leaked them so that the world may experiment with them before the formal announcement.
The Santa Clara, California-based company won't formally introduce the delayed collection until a month or so from now.
Nevertheless, a third-generation Core IB chip is listed on Chinese site Taobao, for a price of 1550 RMB, or $246 / 184.50 Euro.
Additionally, a Core i7-2770K is priced at $440 - $475 (330 to 356.25 Euro) and some Xeon E3-1200v2 series can be found at around $220 / 165 Euro.
To give one example, the Xeon E3-1230v2 can be found at $225 here (168.65 Euro).
Nevertheless, the listings that concern us the most are the ones on eBay, since Chinese websites aren't that easy to navigate for people who don't know the language, even with Google Translate.
Not that it is impossible to deal with Taobao and the others. After all, English-speaking Taobao agents can handle all negotiations with sellers and reship the CPUs, although this will mean a 10% or higher extra fee.
At any rate, searching through eBay may net results like the Core i5-3570K for $319 or Xeon E3-1230v2 CPU for $299. That's 239 Euro and 224 Euro, respectively.
On a related note, there was an incident at the beginning of March (2012), when a user on the Intel community forum posted some issues with what appeared to be either a counterfeit CPU or an engineering Ivy Bridge sample. The unit was bought in Russia and may be causing problems merely because motherboards don't support it yet, not because it may be a faulty product.