Here is the first true-color picture of the GeForce Kepler 104 (GK104) reference PCB shot in full (well, almost, excluding the uneventful PCIe bus connector). The picture provides a panoramic view of the card's VRM as shown in a drawing posted earlier this day, and reveals the strange double-decker power connector. The card is loaded with a 5-phase NVVDC configuration, as detailed in an older article. It also confirms that the GK104 has a 256-bit wide memory interface, with likely 2 GB standard memory amount. This is also the first picture of the GK104 ASIC, which has square package, and somewhat square die. While the PCB is green in color, it's most likely an engineering sample. The final product (branded GeForce GTX 680 / GTX 670 Ti), could have a black-colored one.

The Ivy Bridge LGA1155 processors inbound for April are mom and pop PC chips in front of the monstrosities Intel has planned for the enterprise (and possibly high-end desktop/HEDT) markets, based on the architecture. An 10-core Ivy Bridge-EP engineering sample, made it to the right hands in Taiwan (wrong hands for Intel), that wasted no time in putting them through some tests.

The 10-core Ivy Bridge-EP/EX chip (LGA2011, 2P-capable) features 10 next-generation cores clocked at 2.80 GHz, with 256 KB L2 cache per core, 30 MB shared L3 cache, and HyperThreading technology that enables 20 logical CPUs. This chip crunched WPrime 1024M in 158.5 seconds, and scores 41.78X relative speed in Fritz chess when just 8 of its 20 threads are put to use. You can also find some pretty screen shots of CPU-Z with its long processor selection list and Windows 8 task manager.

The Taiwan Criminal Investigation Bureau has been doing a bit of investigating and has arrested four engineers working for Intel's OEM partners (names not disclosed) for flogging Engineering Sample (ES) processors on eBay. ES processors are intended strictly for qualification testing purposes for development of new products by OEM's and are only loaned to them under strict non-disclosure agreements, hence putting these on eBay is illegal. The Bureau searched the suspects houses last month and found 178 ES CPU's, worth around $800,000. Note that this value seems to be somewhat high, as it would make each CPU worth around $4,500. We will update this article if new values come to light. Also, this is not a new operation that has been busted, since the suspects had admitted to selling around 500 ES CPU's since 2009. For their efforts, the fab four now face five years in prison.

It should be noted for anyone contemplating the purchase of such dodgy CPU's on eBay or similar places, that they may be overstressed and contain faults, due to the intensive and sometimes destructive testing they go through.