i9 10 series Engineering Samples

[JoeJiaD]

While searching for a new cpu for my next pc build I stumbled upon a really cheap engineering sample intel i9 10900 (k, t and normal ones) for around 200-300 dollars which is almost half the price of an official brand spanking new in box version. Took a look at the reviews and people seem to be actually using these things reliably and with accurate clock speeds. Any opinions on this?

 

P.S Found this on taobao, apparantly theres also i7 and i5 engineering samples and even some laptop chips turned desktop socketed chips, very interesting. I know linus has done videos on these but havent really found any 10 series i9 ones before.

[Hold-Ma-Beer]

Gamble if you have cash to spend. I'm saying "gamble" because:

23 minutes ago, JoeJiaD said:

apparantly theres also i7 and i5 engineering samples and even some laptop chips turned desktop socketed chips, very interesting. I know linus has done videos on these

If you remember, some of them didn't work, so yeah......

[CommanderAlex]

Welcome to the forums!!!

 

I'd be very leery buying "i9 engineering samples" as this sounds too good to be true. They are basically the foundations of a new architecture that have yet to be tested out and there can be issues down the line with longevity. 

[JoeJiaD]

Yeah correct, they are pretty interesting though so I might get one to test.

[JoeJiaD]

3 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

Welcome to the forums!!!

 

I'd be very leery buying "i9 engineering samples" as this sounds too good to be true. They are basically the foundations of a new architecture that have yet to be tested out and there can be issues down the line with longevity. 

Thanks! Yeah seems sketchy, gonna take a closer look maybe even go see the seller sometime to take a look of it

[Hold-Ma-Beer]

1 minute ago, CommanderAlex said:

Welcome to the forums!!!

 

I'd be very leery buying "i9 engineering samples" as this sounds too good to be true. They are basically the foundations of a new architecture that have yet to be tested out and there can be issues down the line with longevity. 

O_O

Exactly.......uh...yeah..

Damn brother you're spot on!

[JoeJiaD]

2 minutes ago, Hold-Ma-Beer said:

O_O

Exactly.......uh...yeah..

Damn brother you're spot on!

Yeah I would be most worried about longevity and reliability if I ever bought one.

[CommanderAlex]

Just now, Hold-Ma-Beer said:

O_O

Exactly.......uh...yeah..

Damn brother you're spot on!

I believe I watched LTT videos where Linus looked at them to see if they were real or not instead of spending the money for the final product. Just like how we are seeing engineering samples on synthetic benchmarks with the new Ryzen 5000 series. They tend to have high expectations of engineering samples to simulate real world environments, thus why you see some have higher clock speeds than their mass produced versions . Its like a proof of concept of, "Hey, our new architecture of CPU's works, but there are some things we need to iron out before mass production". Perhaps there is an issue with some of the internal workings of a CPU such as logic gates, memory controller, system controllers. Then they will go back and revise the process to see if it corrects the issue and repeat again to make sure everything is working as intended and especially yields from a single wafer. After that, it would go to mass production.