Conceivably, am I going to see much benefit to using the Core i5 over my 955? Or should I start saving and be looking at a then cheap(er) Core i7/Intel's next offering?

It'll give you a bigger benchmark score, and satisfy your shiny-new-stuff instincts. But I'm pretty sure you'll have to try quite hard to see any real world difference in normal use (with the exception of extremely CPU-intensive tasks). I overclocked my CPU by 52% and didn't notice any non-benchmark related differences except the jump in power consumption (and my RAM blowing up after a while).

Personally, I'd put the money to an SSD instead, but of course you need Winsdows 7 for TRIM support

Well I do a lot of number-crunching with BOINC or sometimes F@H (all under Linux), if the i5 would lead to a noticeable reduction in work unit times it might be worth it, at least for me.

The i5 & i7 fold like demons. A 920 i7 would get 10k ppd in F@H running the new SMP client.

I don't suppose you have figures for the 955 for comparison (stock speed)?

Afraid I don't but I know it's a lot lower.

OK thanks. Just need to convince the girlfriend now that it's necessary and not a waste.

I can't see that a 750 & board would be that much more expensive than a 955 and board. And Sas is right, the quad core Phenoms are shockingly underpowered when compared with i5, let alone i7.

You'd get much more ppd from a GPU based folding client rather than running a CPU based one.

I don't generally fold though - I use BOINC and it doesn't have GPU support for Linux.

Interesting, I still have that i5 MB kicking about. Sounds like I need to get that up, running and folding asap. Should boost my ppd with the 260 I brought a few weeks ago.

All depends on the project. The new core A3 SMP projects are worth alot of points, the linux bigadv's are worth up to 60k & I can complete one in 2 days