Digging To The Core, Times Four!

Lifting a lever on the upper rear corner of the side panel allows it to be easily removed, without voiding the warranty as was once a concern in the days of "sealed" systems.

Removing the massive sink and fan duct allows easy access to Intel's QX6700 processor, a part that first earned our respect in September with strong performance gains in select applications such as multimedia encoding.

The motherboard is detected by Everest as model OEMD975XBGG1, a name that sounds quite familiar. Perhaps it's an OEM-only BTX version of Intel's own D975XBX2? Further evidence of this possibility comes in the form of the Intel OEM BIOS.

A large number of OEM Intel "Extreme" processors have popped onto the market mysteriously marked as engineering samples, and these are too numerous to be anything other than full market releases. Such markings only serve to diminish the secrecy of truly confidential parts, making it easy for unscrupulous product testers to resell their early-revision scraps as the real deal. This isn't a problem for buyers like Gateway who purchase factory-direct, but has already proven confusing to TG Forumz members.