Quote Originally Posted by virtualrain View Post
Check out how your current memory is being bottle-necked by the FSB and how Nehalem's triple-channel DDR3 IMC really opens the spill-way on RAM bandwidth...

Note that Nehalem's tri-channel DDR3-1333 peak bandwidth is on par with Penryn L2 cache! (the likes of which would never be seen on Penryn with it's highly bottlenecked FSB).
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2991
"In our recent DDR3 vs. DDR2 review we discovered a 16% to 18% improvement in memory bandwidth with the P35 chipset. This translated into a 2% to 5% increase in real world performance in some computer applications.

This bandwith will be only for overpriced Bloomfield Nehalem,Nehalems in lower price will come in 2H 2009 and will have only dual channel.I expect Bloomfield setup to be 100-150% more expensive than Penryn setup (Intel will position Bloomfield as high-end system and it will cost) with performance around 10-20% single thread ,20-40% multithread.New drivers and better mobos won't help more than 1-3%.

So until you really need new computer or you are into multithreaded apps upgrade to quadcore Nehalem does make sense.Otherwise you will pay 100% more for about 10-20% improvement - not worth IMO for typical user it's much wiser to upgrade GPU or wait for cheap SSDs.
Quadcore penryn is good enough to wait till 2H 2009 for 32nm shrink where price/performance ration against Penryn will be much better.Most probably octalcores will be available then.

People are expecting marvels from Nehalem but it will be more evolution than revolution.