I generally buy mid range with the plan to have the choice to upgrade at a later date

If you wait until the i930 is out the price on the i920 should drop a bit, it's not like it's bad value considering when I got my E6600 is was £220 or so
It lasted me until the middle of this year when I upgraded to a Q9300, I still use it

Same with my 8800gt, I got it after selling my X1900xt as the performance gain was a small cost, kept it until recently when I got my 4870 about a year ago.

I don't really see the need in getting the fastest to be honest, though as it's a large expense for a small gain, diminishing returns etc

I kinda see that, but what I've always tried to do is spend more on the motherboard and get the best socket/platform/feature set I can then bung a really cheap CPU in it. That way I have the choice to upgrade. My current motherboard is one of the last and best socket 939 boards. It came with 8 SATA ports, RAID, SLi and Gigibit LAN way back in 2004. When I moved to a dual core Athlon, I really noticed the difference. The same when I moved to 2gig from 1gig of RAM.

A 920 is the cheapest chip you can buy for that platform, so it's kinda the same theory. Except that to buy the same kind of level of board for that platform, I'd be paying AT LEAST £150 and probably more towards £200. Not the £100 I spent 5yrs ago.

On the other hand with an AM3 system, I wouldn't look for an upgrade path. I would just chuck the X2 550 BE in there and OC it. Then when AM3 is replaced with AM4 and they're selling out the last few chips, I might grab a cheap X4 if there is one, but I wouldn't be desperate.

But do you see what I mean? A 920 OCd to close to 4ghz isn't going to need replacing for some time to come....

My PC (see sig) is not going to need replacing for some time. C2D and 4GB of RAM will be enough for me until it breaks. I play games like Fallout 3 on max. settings on 1440*900, I only need a HD4650 for that, not some some silly GTX295.

"It's not fututre-proof!"

Tosh! Web browsing and office tasks (video editing excepted - I don't do that anyway) will never need more than a fraction of the power my PC has. If in 2 years' time I can't play the latest game, I'll upgrade to what will then be a cheap mid-range graphics card. If efficiency trends continue, it won't need much more power either.

The only upgrade I'm planning within the forseeable future is an SSD, having seen the astounding, real, noticeable differences it makes to performance in every single area. I'm not going to pay a fortune for i7 when most of the time I'll never be able to tell the difference, even with a stopwatch.

Hmmm..... need to think about that for a sec.

That is my point, the i920 isn't the top of the range, so I would say spend more on the mobo (P55 probably) and some good memory in say a 6gb set, then upgrading cpu/memory to 12gb/faster RAM is fairly easy

Yeah....... but P55 won't run 920! I'm not buying 1156, it's a waste of money IMHO.

Sorry I meant X58, been looking at a P35/45 motherboard for myself and got sidetracked lol