Rare Intel Pentium 4 processor 3.73ghz 2mb EE

Yeah they came in dime a dozen Dells by the boat load.

That's also exactly what reviewers were often given. Intel always samples ES chips to reviewers. AMD's are marked "Not for Resale" but they are basically retail packages and the CPU's themselves do not show as engineering samples the way Intel's do. I've had dozens of Intel ES chips over the years and while they tend to be somewhat hand picked and slightly better overclockers than the average retail chip, they aren't special or even all that rare. The Ebay ad is correct about one thing: They were not sold to the public.
 
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That's also exactly what reviewers were often given. Intel always samples ES chips to reviewers. AMD's are marked "Not for Resale" but they are basically retail packages and the CPU's themselves do not show as engineering samples the way Intel's do. I've had dozens of Intel ES chips over the years and while they tend to be somewhat hand picked and slightly better overclockers than the average retail chip, they aren't special or even all that rare. The Ebay ad is correct about one thing: They were not sold to the public.
The 19k AUD (15k USD?) buy now is ridiculous even for an ES and even more so as you explained. The actual non-ES chip for desktop (ark link) was a pretty good seller if I remember correctly.
 
So I take it the listing's claim of "one of the rarest CPUs available" is BS.
 
So I take it the listing's claim of "one of the rarest CPUs available" is BS.

Completely. Intel literally gave these away for free to dozens if not hundreds of reviewers back when they were new.

Rarer CPU's would be things like the 1.13GHz Pentium 3 or the 3.8GHz Pentium 4. Even rarer would be the specific CPU's Intel sometimes made for a single purpose or client. These are CPU's like it's "Black Ops CPU's". These represented more specialized silicon. Here is an example of one. Intel also had its "Everest" CPU's. These were the best of the best in terms of silicon. Some of these were precursors to CPU models that would eventually be sold to the public but never in large numbers. The QX9775 is an example of this. It was an "Everest" CPU that eventually ended up being sold as a retail product.
 
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lol bidding has ended at a little less than $100 AU. LOL
 
God, what a ride. And all over a CPU that would get its ass kicked up and down the street by a Core 2 Duo someone's getting rid of for a nuisance fee of $5.
 
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Honestly, the biggest thing I got from this thread was that 2011 6 core chip that Dan_D posted for $199, but even at that price, I assume a $100 Ryzen 2600 would still be pretty competitive with it unless you need quad channel memory or have a lot of DDR3 sitting around and have a beefy cooling system. Plus, it's $100 less and uses 1/3 the power.
 
Honestly, the biggest thing I got from this thread was that 2011 6 core chip that Dan_D posted for $199, but even at that price, I assume a $100 Ryzen 2600 would still be pretty competitive with it unless you need quad channel memory or have a lot of DDR3 sitting around and have a beefy cooling system. Plus, it's $100 less and uses 1/3 the power.

* Latency issues aside quad channel DDR3-1600's only as fast as dual-channel DDR4-3200
* DDR3's cheapness is compelling and the LGA2011 chip supports ECC without a problem, but...
* The cooling's insane for the performance delivered, but when Linus Tech Tips did a vid on this CPU (or one like it) he couldn't manage to reliably get it past 3.9 GHz or so. Windows reported a max CPU usage of 88% for him suggesting some weirder than normal clock throttling was going on. It didn't sound like he had a board on hand with VRMs capable of managing the demands of that chip, suggesting that 250W was an optimistic estimate.
* Given that the BIOS indicated the chip was running at 1.6v, it sounds like a helluva headache to get the promised performance versus snagging a Ryzen 2600 that runs at 1/4th the effective power demand while offering comparable performance and AVX2 support. From personal experience I'll also say my stock clocked Ryzen 1700 with all cores at 3.15 GHz crushes an eight core Sandy Bridge EP chip with all-core turbo of 2.5, way more than the clock delta would indicate. Zen+ would be an even bigger jump.
 
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