Blast out 6 cores has a lot different meaning than blasting out 4 cores. Please check out the tech Intel has in place to deliver good performance for a single-threaded app (overclocking the core on which the thread is running on). You build a straw man there: I never claimed that more cores would be worse if more cores would be needed, and neither did I claim that less cores is better if all the rest is the same. For your supposed quote about X6 vs. i5 vs. Phenom, I never said anything like that, another straw man. LTR.

Yes, the US is a bit different compared to Europe. Still, you might show some substantiation for those 2X performance vs. 8X prices.

Ah, again I must apologize in this thread... Finnish Ultimate fighting tournament finals on TV, and a bit drunken wife on the phone...

Apart from the obvious typos in the proper reply, I was "burned" by AMD socket 939. It didn't matter for me, as like I've said, I don't build computers for that upgradeability. I feel sorry for a couple for a couple of my mates who did the worse mistake by buying socket 754, which was pretty much dead once it was introduced. The lesson learned: Do not trust any platform to be for upgrades in the next two years.

That's because the price you'll pay for two CPU is more than just getting a good one that'll carry you through the period. And you are limiting yourself to old tech: Who knows when AMD introduced AM4 socket, which is not backwards-compatible?

Ah, forgot to ask about the PSUs you are using... I've had a cheap one breaking down everything including the floppy drive in my comp, so after that I've only bought good PSUs from brands like Corsair, Cooler Master, and OCZ. No aging problems there, really (and that includes many many more comps than I've owned, as I've build for other people, too).

Interesting... Why the high-end mobo? Those cost substantially more than mid-range. For the other parts, your upgrade path is pretty much what I have been recommending too for those who want to do some upgrades: Don't upgrade the CPU, it's waste of money. If RAM is cheap at the moment, buy a bit more than you really need, otherwise buy more when it's cheaper (RAM prices at the moment are outrageous in Europe).

I'm not sure where you got that 2 years figure though, as my current comp is 4 years old and just about to be replaced, it was high-mid-range when I bought it (so not too expensive, and bang-for-the-buck is good), and the upgrades have been a new HDD and going for 2 extra Gb of RAM (because I need to use Windows 7 for Visual Studio work now, and naturally I used it for some gaming too, alongside with my original Ubuntu+Wine setup).

Your last paragraph is rather rephrasing common sense. Don't buy the latest stuff, as there's always a premium there. Wait a while, and the prices come down.

Sorry, I meant *real world benchmarks*. Try Tom's Hardware for starters. Synthetic benchmarks just show how well the CPU is optimized for that benchmark; a benchie measuring encoding time for a certain vid with a program is whole different issue.

"The 750 is a bit faster, but it is 25% more expensive for less than 25% more performance."

Please show relevant benchmarks. I've done a lot of research on this, and i5 750 is a lot faster in pretty much everything else than gaming, where they are more or less equal (GPU performance is more important there).

"The latest generation of AMD chips also has adaptive clock speeds to improve performance on monolithic tasks, soon that will be available on the x4 chips as well as the x6."

And Intel's new chips use very aggressive load balancing with the new quads: For example, on a basically single-threaded load on one core the core is actually overclocked to get more speed. Both manufacturers have good tech in place, ATM Intel's seems better to me, according to benchies.

Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate buying Intel just by the brand, either. It's all about the uses and budget; my budget at the moment would mean an AMD Athlon II X3 with nVidia GTX 460 1 Gb, as my main uses are gaming and programming. If I could raise my budget a notch, it'd be i5 760 with the same graphics card. Of course, I'm from Europe, so the price difference between i5 quads and Phenom II X4s is a lot less than let's say Newegg's prices in the USA.

Sorry, like I later mentioned, it's board-specific. Care to give the board model?

So, how do you define "price range"? Is that the exact price?

In what uses? X6 CPUs don't really deliver compared to i5, except in uses where you can really blast out all the cores, like vid encoding with certain programs.

And the OP especially was telling how his/her *Phenom II X4* beats everything Intel has to offer in its price range, which is blatantly false. LTR.

You probably mean AM2+ boards. All AM2 boards definitely don't support AM3 CPUs, feel free to check the manufacturer sites.

For the false dichotomy part, you build up another in your case, too. In the last few years (AM2 and AM3 age), the quad cores haven't been too expensive compared to the dual cores. Your example user has made the wrong choice when buying the dual core in the first place; the combined price of the dual and the hexa core CPUs would have given him/her a nice time in multithreaded apps for the whole duration.

The price difference is negligible between AMD and Intel boards, unless you are attending the race to bottom, where AMD rules. You also can't upgrade from an AM2 to AM3 CPU on a AM2 board. The talk about upgrading is meaningless in a broader sense too: Why would you buy something not optimal just so that you can upgrade it later? It's false economy, get the best you can afford now, and a whole new rig with whole new tech a few years later.

So you haven't really done any research there? Intel's i5 750 and 760 "steamroll" all the Phenom II X4 CPUs in the price range. Don't trust me, trust benchmarks.

"Mostly it's just keeping my hand busy."

Well, I think I can guess what's entertaining the non-mouse hand.