I received the cpus a bit earlier than expected. I took a good look at them using a magnifying glass and made notes of a couple of things.I haven't received my mystery chips yet but should this friday. There is still the remote possibility that if these chips are xeon w and some form of es, it might be worth a try to test on a supermicro mb. We have seen similar behavior (not posting or not completely posting) with other es chips on non-supermicro mb but then the same chips were able to post on specific supermicro mb. Unfortunately I am having a hard time trying to find a c422 supermicro mb to test with. something like the Supermicro X11SRM-F might be worth a try.
In regards to delidding, there are simple tools to do this task. It removes the IHS from the PCB. You would then replace the TIM (thermal paste) with something like liquid metal for better heat transfer. The complicating issue here is that most xeon cpus use solder instead of thermal paste. If we did delid this cpu and found that it had thermal paste, it might suggest that this was an i9 chip and not a xeon w series. We could also see the details of the actual chip itself. I am not sure what the i9 vs the xeon w series chip (die) looks like but I am sure we could track that down somewhere. and the mystery continues...........
1. if you shine a light on the bottom of the chip, you can see a blue haze over part of the gold contacts. specifically it looks like something spilled on it then wiped off so that the gold contacts would not be blocked. I tried to clean it with so isopropyl spray but it did not seem to remove it. For those that have these chips, can you shine a light on the bottom and tilt it slightly to see if you notice this blue film?
2. the small chip on the top side, upper right corner (when gold triangle is on the bottom left) has a marking of 642
X8
It also has another marking lower right side of J20146 01 A99448
I still can't tell whether this is a skylake x or xeon w. I did get 2 so I may wind up delidding and looking under the cover!
I may be able to get an asus (both x299 and c422) to test but I would prefer to try on a supermicro if possible. the supermicro x11sra should be compatible with a real xeon w chip.