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Sandy Bridge-E CPUs Too Hot For Intel?
MrSeb writes "Intel's next consumer CPUs — the Sandy Bridge-E — will ship without a heatsink and fan. These new chips, which will feature up to 15MB of L3 cache and integrated four-channel DDR3 and 32x PCI 3.0 controllers will run very hot — potentially up to 180W TDP. Is Intel unable to cool these extreme chips, or is there another reason for the shift? Curiously, Intel will still offer 'sold separately' own-brand cooling solutions for the new chips — so is this merely Intel trying to cut costs for enthusiasts who don't need a stock cooler — or is this the beginnings of Intel branching out into the cooling business?"
Why do you have to high end to get more 16 pcie 3.0 lanes? With all the talk about useing the gpu as a CPU some day it may be better to get a low to mid range cpu and get a good GPU or 2. Also the four PCIe 2.0 lanes linking the cpu to the chip set will get used up fast by USB 3.0, SATA ports and thunderbolt.
You may be able to put thunderbolt on a switch linked to the x16 pci-e lanes but then to get full speed on the video card you need a pci-e 3.0 card or the switch to out put x16 pcie 2.0.