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Sooooooo........ I took apart a friends system and was going to move his Core 2 E6600 to a replacement motherboard only to find that it was a confidential CPU :|. I called Intel and apparently they said we could send it to them, but they won't give us a replacement, or we can keep it....... lol. Well that made my choice easy .

So I was curious if anyone for some reason likes to collect ES processors and would be willing to swap with an equal or faster one? This CPU still works perfectly fine. Here is the information read right off of the cap.

Intel Confidential
QZMR ES MALAY
1 (R) (C) '05 80557PG0562M
Q702A457

Some of the above info may be a bit off, sort of hard to see the numbers exactly. Was just curious, this is the first ES I've come across... Oddly enough he said they bought it from Newegg :O.

They pop up on eBay from time to time, and they tend to be cheaper than "normal" CPUs. I bought a T9550 ES for $40 and upgraded my wife's laptop (which originally had a Pentium Dual Core) with it. I read somewhere that they might use more power than the final versions, but this one is just fine.

Welch wrote:

Oddly enough he said they bought it from Newegg :O.

That's interesting. Have they tried contacting Newegg? Thought this couldn't happen for retail packaged CPUs.

Apparently the friend purchased it along with an entire system build from Newegg well over 5 years ago. I can't imagine how the heck this happened other than Newegg at the time being setup pretty nooby and possibly having received an ES for them to review in their videos and what not, only to later have put it back in package or or something and it being sold as an open box item on accident. The other possibility that has ran through my mind is that someone at Intel may have screwed up either on accident or on purpose. A disgruntled employee attempting to cause a headache for Intel before going their own way? Other than that I can't even fathom how this could have been packaged from the factory and managed to end up in a consumers hands as a retail product.

Well I guess there is one last possibility that I've been excluding... this entire system has seemed fishy to me. The friend who sent it to me had it basically die on him and the "Friend" of his that helped him build in back then took it to his house for the last year or so and had it sitting there, after that same friend claimed the system to be completely screwed. When he got it back the PSU cables were everywhere and not neat like when they built it together. Instead of getting back 2 x 7600 GTs he got back a 7600 GT in hand and there was a 4830 in the PCI-E slot. Sure enough the PSU was screwed and he remembered it being the same PSU, so that's not an issue. Somehow I think the "Friend" that helped him build this, also scrapped some parts off of it at one point in time, just an odd feeling I get. Maybe he had this ES chip laying around from an eBay purchase and decided to drop it in and take out the better chip that was in here.

Why else would you have an Asus Striker Extreme 775 motherboard with an E6600? Does that make any sense to have gotten that CPU to match the motherboard, and only 2 gigs of memory at that? Along with an aftermarket cooler (Zalman) for something like the E6600... wtf?

derFunkenstein wrote:

They pop up on eBay from time to time, and they tend to be cheaper than "normal" CPUs. I bought a T9550 ES for $40 and upgraded my wife's laptop (which originally had a Pentium Dual Core) with it. I read somewhere that they might use more power than the final versions, but this one is just fine.

I did the exact same for a P9700 ES. I would've bought a real one but you couldn't get one outside of a laptop.

The other benefit is that chips that should have locked multipliers usually come unlocked when they are ES.

Apparently this is showing as an E4600 not an E6600. I wonder what kind of overclocking potential this thing has.... hmmmm.

I would comment but http://www.techspot.com/news/46902-engineers-arrested-for-selling-sample-cpus-on-ebay.html

Hmmm interesting story. But it does not seem to really apply to this scenario, at least i don't think so. Im technically not asking to sell it, ive not signed a non-disclosure form, those forms carry 7-10 years anyhow in which case they are useless, its been at least 7 i believe since the release of this particular es chip. To top it all off i contacted Intel who said "ehhh, keep it" because the chip has long been released. From the looks of it those crooks were stealing, then selling chips and some that were fairly new too.

My friend decided to have me reinstall it into his newly upgraded system anyhow.