What do you get
Presented in a large retail box to accommodate the high-end reference cooler, the vast majority of the £700 outlay is in that little chip at the top. Much like central London rents, you're paying an awful lot of wonga for each square-millimetre of silicon.
Intel backs all retail chips with a three-year warranty that's based on the CPU rather than original purchaser. The box also contains a warranty card and thermal goo.
Keeping the fan on quiet and running Prime95's torture test for 10 minutes gave us a load temperature that averaged 69°C, which is well within specification.
Fire it up in an ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard and the 32nm chip idles at 1.6GHz.
