Hasta La Gadget!

The kids over at Maximum PC have told us a sordid tale involving Core i7 processors, “extreme heat and smoke damage,” and a pair of jumper cables — we’ll spare you the details — and have come to the realization that, contrary to popular belief, the retail version of the budget-minded Core i7 920 processor (and its midrange brethren, the 940) is shipping with unlocked multipliers and memory ratios. According to some “Deep Throat”-esque shadowy figure at Intel, the company chalks it up to a “marketing decision” made after receiving “requests from some of our customers.” If this is indeed the case, customers will be able to rock the fast-paced DDR3-1600 memory without shelling out big money on a Core i7 Extreme Edition 965 CPU. And that ain’t the least of it — hit the read link for plenty of talk about QPI speeds and benchmarks. You’ll be glad you did.