I'm still not sure about these CPUs for anything other than top-end netbook/net-top/low-end laptop and small form factor business/media. For gamers a true quad core C2Q, PhII or i5 750 is a better option now that DX11 is here.
I wish Intel hadn't messed up the naming. It should be that these are i3, 1156 quads are i5 and 1366 quads are i7. It confuses my customers and it confuses my boss! I really don't see the point of any of these except the 661 and 540 but I guess Intel had to have a 3.46GHz CPU to 'trump' AMD's 965 but they have the 975 @ 3.6GHz waiting for that.
I'm not convinced about HT, sure it works well on the i7s but on Gulftown the scaling is less than linear (i7 gets ~4.1x or better than linear) despite having 12 threads. HT never really worked well on single cores and seems to fall down for more than 4 cores.
The GPU is pretty pathetic. I got about 1.7k in 3DMark06. Mainstream gaming? Avatar Demo: 7-17fps, minimum settings on 1024x768 they don't come more mainstream than a blockbuster-must-see-movie-tie-in, I'd rather play it on a Wii or PS3. Very disappointed by that game, jungle just doesn't look right if it's not rendered by Crytek, hell Source can look better than this, the guns are crap, the monsters only attack you and only get hit by your bullets, your squadies have blue blood like the beasts (but wont die) and I'm playing on a PC, it's not a beat-em up give me a sodding first person view. If Cameroon had a hand in this and said "which videogame captures the essence of running from massively powerful alien beasts in a jungle setting" why wasn't he told Crysis? Anyway... this GPU does make ION irrelevant once they start strapping it to Atoms and beats AMD to fusion in the same way as the Core 2 Quad beat them to quad core CPUs with a multi chip module.
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