Anartik.com’s Blog

I was looking for this to happen since LGA1366 debuted and it finally did… Intel finally cut prices on LGA775 processors. Most notable (at least to me) is the cut in the price of the Yorkfield Q9650 3ghz Quad which has dropped from $550 to $339.99 with free shipping at the current cheapest online retailer. This Quad has great OC potential with a multiplier of 9 which should yield a stable minimum of 9*450FSB = 4.05ghz and 4.14ghz is also well within reason with proper cooling. Although an I7 would bring you a Quad with 8 threads the Q9650 sports good price performance and most of all provides a viable upgrade path for current LGA775 systems. Like I have noted before desktop applications and games are still few and far between to take full advantage of 4 threads let alone 8. By the time that functionality is fully realized pretty much all current hardware will be obsolete anyway. It really does not pay to buy hardware based on promises of future tech. The I7 is however better suited for servers and high end workstations where many applications are run at once or have specialty software designed for true parallelism i.e. rendering or video encoding.

Note: I believe the reason for the price cuts is not just about the I7 or posturing against the Phenom II. Intel is releasing the S series of Quads which feature reduced power at a significant premium. I don’t see any mention of a Q9650S but the Q9550, Q9400 and Q8200 drop from 95-65 watts. I don’t believe there will be any value for enthusiasts in the S series though.

I took a look today to see what the price would be for an I7 upgrade to my system. Today’s price is running about $1039 + shipping for an Asus P6T, 6gb Corsair DDR3 1600, and a I7 2.93ghz. Of course you could easily spend more with my current board of choice the Asus P6T6 Revolution at around $360. Upgrade paths are always on my mind but I think I will finally upgrade my 8800GTX first with a GTX285.