Yes, the 8180m were bought / negotiated on eBayThanks for the explanation! Did you buy them on ebay, through the forum, or elsewhere?
How did the retail 8180M and 8176M perform in comparison? I assume the ES did not work on your board.
What affected RAM performance? More than just frequency?
It sounds like your build is around $4600+RAM(~$3200?)+SSD's(a lot)+GPU's(many a lots).
Despite trying several motherboard microcode hacks, I could not get the ES / B0 stepping to work on the asus Sage. However the 8180M QS chips worked flawlessly and consistently gave 200-300 (as a pair) more points in cinebench and better scores in other benchmarks when compared to the retail 8180m chips. So I kept those, returned the retail and all the ES chips.
Ram performance: the Samsung ram just performed better than the hynix and micron. It was also cheaper