Intel Core i7 Quads!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ualaa]

Looking at the reviews, the Core i7's will be in three basic varieties initially.

Top of the line ~$1000, middle processor ~$500, low-end ~$250.
Looking at benchmarks, there was very little difference between the 1000 and the 500 models.
The low-end, like the middle and upper needed the new motherboard.
They all used ddr3 ram exclusively, in 3's or 6's instead of pairs like the older ram.

The low-end Core i7' processors were quite a bit more powerful then the Q6600's.
And the board will support the faster chips if you upgrade down the road.
I'd personally go with the middle of the line chip around $500, but if you can afford the $1000 chip its nice to have the best.

[algol]

Sounds like it will be a good upgrade in a couple years when the third WoW expansion comes out, DDR3 is cheaper, the chips are cheaper, and they fix the failure issues.

[puppychow]

Yeah I'm getting ready to build a new PC since my c2duo is a little too slow for Wrath (i really want 5 windows with gorgeous maxed gfx), I kind of want a i7 but imo its a waste at this time. For 1/3d the cost you can get a quad coreww, 8gb of DDR2, a 4870 and you will be able to run 5 WoWs beautifully all maxxed out. With a top of the line i7 you may get maybe 20-30 fps more, but who cares, the difference between 70fps and 90fps isn't worth it to me. In one year there will be much better i7 procs, i7 mobos, graphic cards, and DDR3 will be more reasonable (16GB!) and will be a great time to upgrade again, for essentially the price difference between a quad core and a i7 now.

Now of course the i7 will do farcry2 and stuff like that much better than the quad core, but I don't even bother with that - TF2 is enough for me One other big advantage of the i7 is you can do 3 video cards, but wow doesn't even use 100% of one new video card, who cares about 2x or 3x.

Of course if my wife said for my birthday I could spend $4k on a new PC I'd buy a top of the line i7 in a heartbeat well, probably a 120" LCD first haha

[not5150]

Save your money and go with a Core 2 Quad... put the savings into more memory and possibly an SSD.

[gitcho]

I bought a new core i7 system last monday. Core i7 920, Asus P6T deluxe, 6gb RAM, Asus 4850, Seagate 640MB HD, Antec nine hundred case. It runs really well - no lag on 5 instaces of WOW (60fps+) with firefox (6+tabs) and photoshop CS3 open. I haven't been able to get any one of the cores (it shows up as 8 cores in vista b/c of hyperthreading) to max out for more than a few seconds. It was a bit pricey, but I was upgrading from a 5+yr old barton athalon 2500 with 1gb of RAM - so I'm pretty happy.

[Noids99]

2 x problems with your spec above. The Intel Motherboard only has 4 slots for RAM and 3GB RAM (as mentioned above) is too little for MBing. Ideally you want 8GB+ now with 64bit OS.

Go for either an Asus, MSI, Gigabyte mobo as they all include 6 RAM slots so you can setup 2 x groups of triple channel memory.

The new quad cores are intels first native quad cores with 4 cores on the one die. The other big plus is an onboard memory controller making the FSB redundant. Finally and best of all for us boxers, Nehalem brings back hyperthreading which means our new quad cores will have 8 virtual cores for assigning to different characters.

The motherboards have the advantage of housing 12GB RAM without going to expensive 4GB DIMMS. They can also accomodate Crossfire and SLI on the same platform. For overclockers, removing the FSB makes the northbridge much cooler for overclocking and that cheap little i7 920 can OC to 3.9GHz on air quite comfortably.

Cheers

[weeep]

I'll LOL @3Gb RAM too. This system will run 5box MUCH slower than old Q6600 + 8Gb RAM.

[Nairi]

more cpu power = better for multiboxing. a 9800gt is more than enough for 4-5 sessions but will be limited by older cpus i.e q6600

Intel Core i7 920 is $300-400 8o

Q6600 is $180. I assume that's the cheap i7 quad or you wouldn't have brought it up. But it still matches what I said, so what's your point?


Also, yes, 3GB RAM is wtflol small for a $4500 computer intended to multibox - you're doing it wrong. 4x2GB is like $100 these days. Excuses, you has none.

[Soto]

Sigh... error on deleting

[Nitro]

3gb of ram on a $4000+ machine makes baby jesus cry

If your thinking of 5 boxing with that they you will get smoked by a person running more ram on $1000 machine.