Quote Originally Posted by YukonTrooper View Post
$800-$1000? Where are you getting your numbers? I just purchased an i7 920, 3GB DDR3, and the Gigabyte X58-DS4 for $750 Canadian; that's $630 US.
Well at that price i can guess at the ram
That's $300 for the entry level chip
$260 for the low/mid level Motherboard (cheapest being $210, highend $400)
$70-80 for 3 gigs of 1066 or maybe 1333 ram. About the cheapest you can get and not by any means high end or best OC solution
Fail to include AF HS as intel box coolers are crap and need one to overclock. which would take cost closer to $700 and still is not ideal for OC.

$150 6 gigs of the cheapest triple channel is which running 64bit vista would require
$564 2.93 ghz i7 940
Same motherboard takes it to $974 and bumping up to the $300 mid level board and an AF heatsink brings it closer to $1100

Comparitively existing AM2+ costs $235-$275 to drop in a chip
$150 for mid level GX OC board
$40 for for 4 gigs of OC ram, $80 for 8 gigs
Can use existing coolers
System cost $425 -$505 Which is still not the cheapest you can go.

Quote Originally Posted by gallag View Post
And my point is you do not even need to compare it to i7, Just intels low-med quads, And total system draw is not important now? Temps are a lot higher than people thought? Overclocking is not as good as the es samples AMD sent out to be leaked? IPC still below kentsfield? And people think this is a great result? Come on, Sure you can make the argument that it is as good as any cpu when gpu limited etc but that is nothing new. Dont get me wrong, It is ok and will help AMD a lot because people like me will actually consider AMD now instead of instantly thinking Intel when planing low end builds for people, But it is a far way from great. I was hopping for something that would be competitive against i5 when it comes out but instead AMD will be competing with low end quads by then. Basicaly the performance gap between i5-i7 and ph2 is bigger than the performance gap between penryn and phenom1. Still, every build I do atm has a hd4850 in it so AMD are not left out in the cold.
  1. If you'll notice, some of the pens outperform I7 in some things
  2. As i said, system draw has nothing to do with power consumption of the cpu itself, and aside from that phenom II has system load 25%+ lower then I7
  3. Temps and overclocking were based on stock box cooler for PII's
  4. Overclocking was done with stock box coolers while intel was getting water in some reviews even than PII overclock was not benched. Yet the consensus is still 3.9-4.1ghz on air with the right board which is a high end 790fx that is closer to the cost of one of the cheapest i7 boards.
  5. As for your use of gpu, i think it has less to do with "not wanting to leave AMD out in the cold" and more to do with the 4850, 4870 and 4870x2 being the best price/performance ratio on the market as they have been since the day they were launched.