the Q9450 finally showed up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115039

Its sold out already, but its Xeon cousin isn't...

http://www.ncixus.com/products/28849/BX80569X3350/Intel/

Btw, whats the major difference? are the Xeon variants just binned higher?

If anyone's looking for a Xeon E3110, I just found some IN STOCK at ncixus.com for a very nice price (much cheaper than Newegg's non-existent E8400 price). Can't wait to get it. Disclaimer: I've never dealt with these people before, but I saw some positive comments online about them. YMMV.

I have one too. Great unit out of the box, even without overclocking.

I noticed a difference between the specs of the Core 2 Duo E8400 and the Xeon E3110 as listed on Newegg:

E3310 Voltage 1.225V-0.956V
E8400 Voltage 0.85V – 1.3625V

Interesting. Is this only a difference in binning? I don't really plan to overclock my CPU, so I don't care that much about it, but I wonder what effect that would have on overclocking. I notice the price is WAY lower for the E3100 on Newegg. It's even lower than the price of the E8200! Weird.

Intel can't get these chips into the retail channel because it does not have enough 45nm plants open yet. If I remember right, they only have 2, and 1 is for their experimental chips, the other is Arizona facility, called Fab 32. So you have one plant feeding all consumer 45nm chips.

The xeon versions of the chips are higher binned, so they run at lower voltage for the same speed. My roommate just got a e8400 that was a little disappointing, 3.8ghz on 1.4v, but there are xeon versions of this chip that are doing that speed on 1.3v, and 4.1-4.2 on 1.4. He is selling his chip to my work for just a desktop computer and getting the xeon.

I just changed my Q9450 pre-order to the xeon version of the same chip (3350). These chips will hit a fsb wall (only the quads) around 475 (hoping my dfi x48 will help raise that a tiny bit), so 475*8=3.8ghz, I am happy with that, but now that I changed to the xeon I can do it at a lower voltage, which means a cooler room. I am not worried about heat at all inside my case:
http://splak.net/computer/watercooled/
swiftech 3x120 radiator, northbridge, res, and pump with petra conversion, dtek cpu block.

The underlying question is why can't Intel get these chips into the retail channel? Penryn and Wolfdale have officially been out since November, but scarcity in availability appears to be the norm for the last 4 months. Not especially comforting, given that Intel usually doesn't suffer the inventory issues that plague AMD. Was it just a question of milking the 65nm inventory as much as possible, and waiting for main board manufacturers to release product that takes better advantage of Penryn's improvement in architecture? Hmmm.....

Paper launch ftw

the Q9300 has no cooler included.
This is right ?

These new 45nm chips maybe the last of the great overclockers.
It seems they'll do 4Ghz on air.
Thats way better than a Conroe can comfortably do.
When do the E8500s and Q9450s arrive in stock?

E8400? I bought one of those amazing pieces back last month.