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Amethyst

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2006
599
287
Can i use "Engineering Sample" Xeon (A0 stepping / B0 stepping Westmere-EP) with Mac Pro 2009 Dual CPU?
 

Amethyst

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2006
599
287
They'll probably run. But beware of the tendency of most to have lower than standard turbo boosting performance - though a few might have higher than standard turbo boost performance.
Thank guys, i will order A0 x5670 xeons.
 

Asgorath

macrumors 68000
Mar 30, 2012
1,573
479
I think this came up a while ago, but it's illegal to buy/sell engineering samples. As such, I would strongly urge you to not do so.
 

deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,227
3,825

Common sense. These aren't sold without NDAs and license to distribute to third parties. They aren't supported by Intel either. The can be bugs present in these chips which never made the commercially released version.

If buying to run for giggles in a lab, fine. But if for a production machine to do work on. This doesn't make any sense at all.
 

avemestr

macrumors regular
Aug 14, 2012
177
23
Common sense. These aren't sold without NDAs and license to distribute to third parties. They aren't supported by Intel either. The can be bugs present in these chips which never made the commercially released version.

If buying to run for giggles in a lab, fine. But if for a production machine to do work on. This doesn't make any sense at all.

Agree, I would never use ES versions myself.

But I did not find it common sense that buying ES would be considered a crime. There's a difference between shooting a person and breaching a contract. In the first case, the government takes action against you, in the other a private company takes action against you. So when I doubted the illegality of buying ES samples, it's because I considered illegal to be "stuff that government puts you in prison for".

The case with Gizmodo and iPhone comes to mind. Common sense would say that what Gizmodo did was illegal, but even in such a high-profile case where the buyer obviously knew it to be stolen goods, the public prosecutor gave up pressing criminal charges.
 

ClassObject

macrumors 6502
Mar 1, 2010
272
1
It is not legal to sell engineering sample chips. Never buy or even use them unless via NDA with intel. Take the risk and you're totally on you're own.
 

ActionableMango

macrumors G3
Sep 21, 2010
9,612
6,907
1) By definition, it's stolen.

2) These are prototype chips sent for testing. I've seen many of these threads before. In most cases it seems to work just fine. However, anyone who gets the wrong stepping finds it won't work. And even if you get the right stepping, it still might not work anyway.
 
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