has anyone had any horror stories with ES CPU's?

Oh yeah forgot. With the newer ES cpu's make sure the ones that can turbo are able to to turbo on all cores. most ES cpu's can turbo up to 3ghz or so but only two cores with the other cores on default 2ish ghz.

I'll look into that, ill fire off another message to the seller possibly, I'd have thought it'd be a 3.1GHz single and something close to that on all but probably closer to 2.8GHz~ that said in the few games i would play It can't do worse than my old L5640s which were 2.2GHz Base and a max single core turbo of 2.8GHz and back them my GPU was the limitation not the CPU's :p so since the E5 is better architecture I'd assume it'd do a bit better than that when I do occasionally play games (it'll pretty much just be a virtuilisation workstation with games on the side :p)
 
I've had probably a dozen ES E5's (Sandy Bridge E's), including a 4P setup. I'm on a workstation with a single C0 8-core SB-E CPU right now.

First of all, THE place to ask about this sort of stuff is the #hardfolding IRC channel. There are a lot of people there who really know their stuff, down to which steppings/Q-codes have which quirks. There's an exhaustive spreadsheet that used to be floating around as a list, not sure if it's still maintained as I haven't kept up on it.

I'm not sure if C0/B0 mean the same thing on Haswell-E, but contrary to what some people have said in this thread, I have run C0 (late) ES Sandy Bridge-E E5's with current BIOS in SuperMicro, Asus, and Intel motherboards (all dual processor boards). All were rock-solid with no weird issues. B0 will be much more quirky, and I have successfully run that on Asus and Supermicro boards with older BIOS revisions. I ran a dual B0 E5 workstation as my main work PC for a year. It had issues with PCIe video cards (wouldn't work with my 650ti or 760ti at the time), but worked fine with lower-power cards (I ended up running it with an NVS510 and NVS450, which did everything I needed and drove my 8 monitors). I also ran it with an ES Xeon Phi and a PCIe SSD with no issues- with 128gb of RAM, that machine was a real workhorse.

Some chips (particularly earlier revisions) may have features that won't work, like HyperThreading, C-state power management, Turbo, or VT. Do your research, buy from a reputable seller (they do exist in this space), and, IMHO, get a board that you can downflash to an earlier version if your BIOS is too new. This isn't possible on many Asus boards.

In case you can't tell, I'm a huge fan of ES CPUs. When I put my 4p box together, I spent $2,200 on 4 CPUs that would have cost nearly $20k at retail, and it never gave me so much as a hiccup.
 
I've had probably a dozen ES E5's (Sandy Bridge E's), including a 4P setup. I'm on a workstation with a single C0 8-core SB-E CPU right now.

First of all, THE place to ask about this sort of stuff is the #hardfolding IRC channel. There are a lot of people there who really know their stuff, down to which steppings/Q-codes have which quirks. There's an exhaustive spreadsheet that used to be floating around as a list, not sure if it's still maintained as I haven't kept up on it.

I'm not sure if C0/B0 mean the same thing on Haswell-E, but contrary to what some people have said in this thread, I have run C0 (late) ES Sandy Bridge-E E5's with current BIOS in SuperMicro, Asus, and Intel motherboards (all dual processor boards). All were rock-solid with no weird issues. B0 will be much more quirky, and I have successfully run that on Asus and Supermicro boards with older BIOS revisions. I ran a dual B0 E5 workstation as my main work PC for a year. It had issues with PCIe video cards (wouldn't work with my 650ti or 760ti at the time), but worked fine with lower-power cards (I ended up running it with an NVS510 and NVS450, which did everything I needed and drove my 8 monitors). I also ran it with an ES Xeon Phi and a PCIe SSD with no issues- with 128gb of RAM, that machine was a real workhorse.

Some chips (particularly earlier revisions) may have features that won't work, like HyperThreading, C-state power management, Turbo, or VT. Do your research, buy from a reputable seller (they do exist in this space), and, IMHO, get a board that you can downflash to an earlier version if your BIOS is too new. This isn't possible on many Asus boards.

In case you can't tell, I'm a huge fan of ES CPUs. When I put my 4p box together, I spent $2,200 on 4 CPUs that would have cost nearly $20k at retail, and it never gave me so much as a hiccup.

I'll go have a look at the place you mentioned before, seems like it'd be worth a look :)

I've not come across much in the way of stepping info for the Haswell xeons really but im sure if i look hard enough i can get there eventually

Yeah I'm only going with sellers that'll take returns if it doesn't work, so far I have one such seller and im waiting for a response from another.

The cost benefit is why on going this way XD for the build im planning it'll cost £2100~ ($3276.10) with monitors and the like for a 12 core beast 32gb ram and a 980ti :p (for some games on the side, this build is for virtuilisation as has been mentioned above and gaming on the side but it's to last me a long time XD) but if i went retail on the xeon it'd be £2981 ($4650.51) itll be exactly £320 for a 12 core 24 thread xeon If it works well :p
 
I'll go have a look at the place you mentioned before, seems like it'd be worth a look :)

I've not come across much in the way of stepping info for the Haswell xeons really but im sure if i look hard enough i can get there eventually

Yeah I'm only going with sellers that'll take returns if it doesn't work, so far I have one such seller and im waiting for a response from another.

The cost benefit is why on going this way XD for the build im planning it'll cost £2100~ ($3276.10) with monitors and the like for a 12 core beast 32gb ram and a 980ti :p (for some games on the side, this build is for virtuilisation as has been mentioned above and gaming on the side but it's to last me a long time XD) but if i went retail on the xeon it'd be £2981 ($4650.51) itll be exactly £320 for a 12 core 24 thread xeon If it works well :p

This seller is kind of the gold standard on eBay: http://stores.ebay.com/Xtreme-Micro/_i.html?_nkw=xeon+es&submit=Search&_sid=862255747

Also, if you're willing to deal with international shipping (and Google Translate or have someone who speaks Chinese to help you), you can probably find better deals on Taobao. Anyone outside of China will likely need to use a buyer agent to complete the transaction- http://www.taobaonow.com/ is reputable.
 
This seller is kind of the gold standard on eBay: http://stores.ebay.com/Xtreme-Micro/_i.html?_nkw=xeon+es&submit=Search&_sid=862255747

Also, if you're willing to deal with international shipping (and Google Translate or have someone who speaks Chinese to help you), you can probably find better deals on Taobao. Anyone outside of China will likely need to use a buyer agent to complete the transaction- http://www.taobaonow.com/ is reputable.

All in dollars for the first one which means international shipping but im perfectly happy with that, they look to have good selection at least too, ill have a better look into it tomorrow when I get up :)

I'll have a look into the other option too yeah, many thanks :) you've been a massive help, ill report back with my findings :p
 
Second seller got back to me, the e5 2667 v3 has also been tested in an asus Z10PE-D8 WS and their returns policy is the same as the first seller so if it doesn't work in my board i can return it for a full refund
 
Second seller got back to me, the e5 2667 v3 has also been tested in an asus Z10PE-D8 WS and their returns policy is the same as the first seller so if it doesn't work in my board i can return it for a full refund

Whenever you're finding out what boards these CPUs have been tested in, make sure you ask what BIOS version was tested too. Remember, you can't flash an earlier version onto an Asus board (I once made this mistake with a Z9PA-D8).
 
Whenever you're finding out what boards these CPUs have been tested in, make sure you ask what BIOS version was tested too. Remember, you can't flash an earlier version onto an Asus board (I once made this mistake with a Z9PA-D8).

ill ask now and report back

yeah, im aware of the no flashback part with asus boards, ill likely be going gigabyte (x99m gaming 5) so hopefully this will get around this issue
 
As has been mentioned, every intel ES chip is property of Intel, and it's illegal to buy or sell one. That said I sincerely doubt Law Enforcement or Intel are going to hunt you down for purchasing an ES of a CPU that's been released, but they COULD if they really wanted, receiving stolen property is a crime in the US.

They have gone after people, at least in the Pacific Northwest where they have a lot of operations.

I had a friend that distributed a few that he got. One of the guys he gave one to tried to sell it on Craigs List and got a visit from Intel.

This was years ago, though.
 
They have gone after people, at least in the Pacific Northwest where they have a lot of operations.

I had a friend that distributed a few that he got. One of the guys he gave one to tried to sell it on Craigs List and got a visit from Intel.

This was years ago, though.

Yeah, I haven't heard of anything like this happening in probably a decade.

Here's Intel's policy, straight from the horses' mouth: http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-030747.htm

My read on it: they've accepted that there are enough of these CPUs out there's not much of a point in trying to stop it, so long as unscrupulous vendors aren't trying to pass them off as retail CPUs. There are businesses with eBay stores that do a large volume of sales in clearly-labeled ES CPUs, and have been openly doing so for years.

Particularly with Xeons, I really doubt that Intel is terribly worried about a tiny minority of computing enthusiasts cannibalizing their monopoly on enterprise CPU sales. It's always interesting when major cloud service providers upgrade their fleet, as you can see the market distortions. When some major corporate (I think it was Facebook?) upgraded from L5639 Xeons a year or so back, eBay was FLOODED with these relatively awesome CPUs for like $60/each.

We are but a drop in a much tinier bucket. If Facebook starts buying ES CPUs en masse, then Intel will crack down. The PR implications in the age of social media of the CPU police coming to take some nerd's ES CPUs in the night are just not worth it.
 
I don't think it's been a decade, but not very far off.

I think major contributing factors were that 1) its was near a significant portion of Intel operations and 2) it was around the time of a major architecture change that was a game-changer, so there may have been more interest in keeping things guarded.

Now AMD is probably nearly irrelevant for Intel, so it probably doesn't matter as much. I'd agree they aren't terribly concerned about it these days, with all the sales on eBay.

ETA: I did get to see a pre-ES quad core chip, that was neat--just for the nerd factor. The guy wanted to borrow some of our hardware to see if it would work in a ES motherboard (I kind of wondered why if he had the chip he didn't have a board). I tried really hard to convince them to let me play with one, but no go. We got the ES versions probably about a year later.
 
im looking more and more towards the E5-2667-v3 at the moment, it's shaping up to be the better move really since this will be used for games on the side, i know the 2670-3 would do the job too but since ill be throwing some high level hardware into this in terms of gpu's (likely a 980(ti) or if i can get them cheap enough 1 or 2 295x2's but then the heat problems will arise with all of this being in an matx case) id have thought a higher clock speed would likely be the better idea here.
 
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