Thats what I'm saving my nickels and dimes for.I didnt realise just how pathetic my e-machines pc had gotten til I started making my first dream.

7 hour renders just to find out you did something wrong followed by 7 hour renders just to add motion blur followed by many,MANY video compression test...etc...

Then scrap the whole thing and start over because there was too much motion and it was too long to compress to 150mb...

I want one of these BAD!

Me want. 

I love my i7 920. Asus P6T water cooled and running renders at 4073mhz 12 gigs o ram. They really are money well spent!

I have an i7 920, and it's the weakest piece of hardware I have ever seen. Can't even build a desktop with it.

I have one, sitting in a box at work! I am dying to get it up and running but since we have been burglarized three times in 10 months am afraid to bring it home! As soon as we get moved into our new place it will be set up before anything else gets done! I can't wait for the experience!

They just released 16 gb DDR3 Ram sticks, so in a 12 slot motherboard...192 gb of RAM. 

Jafo remembers his first Pentium 100 with 8 meg of ram ....nah....would never need more than that....

[always thought the XT with 640k was under done, tho]

I'm on the fence with the i7 ... If I go this way, I'll need a new mother board,

DDR3 memory, 850w PSU and a full tower. It's also a major change if I go

with a AM3 CPU ... new mother board, DDR3 memory and PSU. Right now,

I've got a good system ... better then most ...  ..

MB: MSI K9A2 Platinum with a AMD X4 9850

Memory: 8GB

Drives: 1 Blue-ray, 4 500GB HDs

Video: 2 ATI 4830 setup in Crossfire

OS: Windows 7 ( latest build)

I have a few systems I us on a daily basis ... This system is used for testing ..

Most likely I'm going to wait for something newer to get released. As soon as

Windows 7 gets released ... I would say around Sept. time frame just in time

for going back to school ... ..   More likely RTM in Sept. and Oct 30,2009

would be the release party ... 

I might just get both around X-mas time and skip getting presents for the

family ...  ...  maybe not .. but I'm thinking about it ..

damn nice , can't wait for the i7's to drop in price...

GenBlood: If you have the money and want to spend them on something shiny for yourself then I'd say go for it. Personally I dropped around 3 grand on a new i7 rig about a month ago and it really does demolish every other cpus out there. Combined with some lovely sticks of ram in triplechannel and it's like night and day from my old e8500 (despite it being OC'ed to 3.8ghz).

A Core i7 920 can be overclocked to around 3.4ghz with the stock cooling as long as there's decent airflow in the rest of the case and you don't live in sahara, and at that point it will outperform a stock 965. Will go a lot further with some real cooling, of course.

ToJKa: A processor is always maxed out when performing a task unless another component is bottlenecking or you have artificial limiters in place, such as vsync turned on while playing a game. You could get a 965, toss it in a liquid nitrogen bath and overclock it to hell and back (pardon my french) and it would still be maxed out on something simple like compressing a large file archive. What changes is how fast you can complete the task at hand, which in this hypothetical scenario would be pretty damned fast.

You might want to have a look at IBM, VIA, SIS and TI. There's more manufacturers out there than AMD and Intel. Also, they're introducing quite a bit more than just "a little power at a time". Check out some benchmarking charts for the latest generations of cpus sometime and compare them to earlier ones. There's usually been a 50-100% increase between each new processor family if not more. Also, factor in the power consumption of today's cpus versus the ones used 5 years ago and you'll notice that they are in fact pretty darned impressive improvements. A brand new i7 has comparable power consumption to an overclocked Prescott, but performance is what, 10-20 times higher (I'm a lazy bum and haven't checked the exact figures on prescott performance relative to i7, but feel free to have a look)?

Brad what OS is that? Does not look like Vista x64 ...but Win7???

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64
ASUS Rampage II Extreme LGA 1366
Intel Core i7 CPU 965 @ 3.20GHz
12GB G. Skill DDR3 1600 Triple Channel
BFG Tech GeForce GTX 280 1GB 512-bit GDDR3
1 WD VelociRaptor 300 GB, 4 WD Caviar Green 1TB
Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W
Antec Twelve Hundred (7 Fans)
COOLER MASTER V8 CPU heatsink/fan
LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner Black
LG 4MB Cache SATA Internal Blu-ray Burner Super Multi Blu-ray Disc Burner
Hannspree HF259H 25" LCD Display @ 1920 x 1080
Gateway FPD2275W 22-inch LCD Display @ 1680 × 1050

Bought this setup back in late December/early January. Little over $4k but well worth it. These i7's rock like you wouldn't believe. I can encode a 2 hour avi to DVD in like 6-8 mins. Takes longer to burn the discs now than it does to encode. I'm transoding 1080p .mkv files to my Xbox 360 using Tversity with no playback problems. When I tried that with my old Athlon 5400+ rig would lock up and would get a still picture on Xbox. Haven't even attempted to overclock yet. I hear people have gotten the i965 up to 4.0 GHz  on just air.