Quote Originally Posted by iocedmyself View Post
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.



  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.

Yep, after being such a rabid supporter of Phenom II I've toyed with the idea of an i7 over the past few days (just switched my GPU to Nvidia 55nm 260 for use with the 3D system soon to be released), and I realized that I may need more horsepower to make that happen. After pricing out an i7 system, it costs WAY more than I thought to assemble even a decent-ish midrange setup. Not even close to being worth it.

I guess if I want to go SLI I'll have to go SLI-on-a-stick, the X58 is totally out of the running for the moment at least. It's price to performance ratio just isn't there.