nehalem at 4GHz with air cooling

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/1007 [...] index.html

sorce is not the best but .... it looks legit?

Tweaktown DEMANDS that I turn my adblocker off! Well I say tits or GTFO!!

Anyways yea, as more info (true or false) starts to bleed through the cracks its looking like this is step sideways instead of a step forward. Intel is full of it if they think im going to get rid of my badass DDR2 Reapers to buy some overpriced DDR3, as well as abandon my Q6600 and P45 for a marginal performance increase, maybe not any at all when up against a E8xxx or Q overclocked @ 3.2+.

This isnt just a simple hardware upgrade/replacement, we are talking about a whole new socket, this isnt an AM2 to AM2+ deal where you didnt need to replace your motherboard more than likely, we WILL have to replace our motherboards and X58 will without a doubt be $250+, with ASUS release some lame models for $500, Striker Maximus Formula 3 ROG Alpha Neo Stage 2.

Unless there is a significant price drop in DDR3 and these X58 boards are well under $250 (which they wont be), then hefty tax return or not, im not ditching my current system, ive put way to much time getting this thing stable and customized. Im getting to old and bills are getting to high to keep this hobby up.

Well, considering this first chip is just using upgraded Penryn cores, I didn't expect a huge desktop performance boost over Penryn. Now it'll definitely lay down the hurt on the server side against AMD though, depending on whether Shanghai is competitive with it.

Since when are ES versions unlocked?

As far as I know engineering sample processors always have unlocked multipliers. It remains to be seen whether the less expensive Bloomfields will have unlocked multipliers in the production version. Given that Intel's general practice has been to only have unlocked multipliers on their high end parts, I suspect that only the top end Bloomfields in the $1000+ range will get the unlocked multiplier.

One thing that disturbs me a bit is that these reports of high overclocks on engineering samples reminds me a lot of the articles written about the AMD Phenom ES parts. Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be mostly hype as well.