Intel Sandy Bridge Desktop CPUs and Mobos On Sale Now

While most of the world is still waiting for CES 2011, when Intel will make its grand Sandy Bridge unveiling, in order to start churning-out product reviews and impressions (and, confidentially, so are we), it seems that, in certain markets, the Sandy Bridge CPUs and motherboards have already gone on sale, a full three weeks before the official launch.

So, if you happen to be traveling to Malaysia, you might want to take along some extra bucks in order to get yourself setup for an early hardware upgrade, since, as Engadget informs us, the Core i5-2300, the i5-2400, and the Core i7-2600 desktop CPUs, plus a couple of mobos, have already gone on sale on the local Malaysian market.

So, it seems that a well-known local retailer called Compuzone has outed quite a few new CPUs pertaining to the Sandy Bridge family, and in very public manner too (not only have they listed the processors on their website, pricing included and all, but they've also posted some photos of a stack of CPU boxes on their Facebook page).

Beside the CPU themselves, the same retailer has also listed a couple of motherboards designed specifically for the new platform, coming from ASUS and Gigabyte (incidentally, the first two manufacturers to out Sandy Bridge-compatible boards when the NDA expires in a few weeks' time).

And if you happen to be curious about the pricing, you should know that the 3.4GHz Core i7 model retails for around 939RM ($301), followed by 609RM ($195) for the 3.1GHz 2400, and 585RM ($188) for the 2.8GHz 2300.

Of course, it's a bit early to decided whether the retailed decided to forget about the Intel's NDA altogether, or whether the chip manufacturer has decided to start silently releasing the new hardware components in some distant markets, where their impact wouldn't be that important.

Oh well, guess that this is not even such an important issue, since not that much time is left before the official Sandy Bridge invasion commences and the clock is ticking as we speak.