Help!!! May Have Wasted Money

I originally asked this question in the xm overclocking thread but I also thought I would post a new thread. I just bought a 2920xm es from shirleyfu for $326. I got really excited when I saw the price and thought I couldn't pass it up. However I did not know what the ES stood for. I am fairly new at this but I read notebook review a lot as I also own an m11xr2. Once I learned what the ES stood for I feel as if I may have just thrown away $326. I'm wondering if there are any other people who have this same chip in there system and what problems they have run into if any. Is it worth installing into my system or should I just take the loss and maybe try to sell it to someone else for cheaper. I have an m17xr3 2630qm 8gb 1600 MHz ocz vertex 3 120gb ssd x 2 radeon 6870m.

 

Don't worry you will be fine ES cpu's are basically the same as OEM and a lot of people don't like them I own like 5 of them in the past and never experience any bug or stability problem

edit : check this out Mumak the creator of HWinfo 32 post this on another forum I hope he don't mind

"HWiNFO marks it correctly since it's neither a 2820QM nor a 2920XM. Uncle described almost perfectly the difference between ES/Production Units.
And since uncle doesn't have so much insight into internal Intel things and processes (which I have), I can give you a bit more info...
There are usually stages during the development process. First, there are very limited internal samples for low-level debugging/development (I don't have much info about such units).
Then the ES0 stage comes which is still a very limited amount and available only to few selected priority customers. These units usually are able to fully boot a system, but have many bugs.
Later, ES1 stage comes - for testing of more features (but still many bugs inside and certain features not enabled). For example, the Ivy Bridge ES1 samples are already out for some time (just to give you an estimation how long the process takes and in what advance they are produced) ;-)
Later ES2 units are released usually with most features enabled, but often still do not represent final product. Sometimes are pretty close to final power targets.
The final stage of samples is called Qualification Samples (QS) - these usually represent the final parts with almost all features working and tested.
Usually such parts are promoted into Production Units without any modification and sometimes require only very minor (no functional) updates..

That CPU is ES2 and (if I count correctly) for this model there are about 14 bugs that have been fixed between ES2 and QS (so that CPU has ~14 bugs that Intel considered serious enough to have them fixed in the final silicon)."

 

Thanks Speedy for the info. Do you know off hand where I could find a list of those bugs. That post still doesn't make me comfortable enough to install it. Like I said I'm really new at this and I love my computer. But I don't want to permanently screw it up.

 

The bugs are on a very technical silicon level that only Intel hardware techies know about. Will not affect your system. It's not like "when virtualizing, system will crash because the owners dog ate my banana". More like CPU TDP won't go much higher than 99w, VID won't go as high as an OEM etc. It won't affect usage.

 

So as far as overclocking I won't be able to do much with this cpu past the 3.4 that it can go up to. And do you know of anyone that had their computer render useless because of using an ES chip.

 

No the worst thing that can happen is the CPU fails and I would bet my M17x R3 on the fact that it won't if you know what you are doing. Also you will be able to get some juice out of it. Maybe up to 4GHz?

 

OK thank you for the help. I used your guide to help overclock my CPU before I bought this one so I'll update that thread on my results once I have this chip installed.