Thing is, it's kinda consumers-ville. It might be better than AM3, but that's by a marginal amount. The price however, is significantly higher. With i7 proper only being another £100 or so and with higher memory bandwidth, more memory and hyperthreading, it's more future proof. If i5 were in line with AM3 pricing, I might be more inclined. I suppose I want to consider AM3 because it's a cheap price point, but also perfectly capable of most tasks. i7 is far more future-proof and capable (not to mention a lot better all-round) but it's a lot more money.

It will become like Socket 478 and 754, it's a socket that offers only moderate performance, not to mention lack of support for higher end expected features present on the i7

I've always thought 'future-proof' was a bit of a red herring these days, cos many people would have to keep hardware until it creaked before they found themselves hitting the performance buffers in the day to day, and then they'll probably buy the latest expensive, shiny hardware at that point anyway...

I suspect for a lot of people the main consideration in that sense would be games (which is fair enough), anything else would probably be just a memory or SSD upgrade

The thing with "future-proof" at the moment, is that all CPUs are between 3 and 4ghz on air. The performance they offer for day-to-day computing is currently reasonably similar. The thing about i7 is it offers features that although nice now, will continue to get more and more relevant over the next 12-24mths. AM3 and 1156 are more about now. That's cool for most people, but i7 offers the possibility of being the new Q6600. The kind of chip and platform that will run and run for the next little while.

Would the Q6600 make a noticeable difference in games to, say, an E8400?

Does the CPU drastically affect your chosen GPU? Games are about the only scenario I can really see the average user needing something like a Q6600, assuming it was mostly gonna be used for Office, the net etc...

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/ ... i=3513&p=1

Roadmap for Intel into 2010

an E8400 gives better performance in most games due to the way they are written, some scale to quad/higher such as Supreme Commander but they are pretty few and far between

Quad core is best for very intensive work such as programming/debugging, image/video editing and encoding etc, not really standard work

Saying that there is nothing wrong with the Q6600 in terms of performance for an average user

But as I said, quad-core will become more important to both games and plenty of other tasks over the coming 12-24mths. This is what makes i7 more attractive in the medium term. For right now, a C2D or Phenom XII is fine, but that's the whole crux of what I wanted to debate.

Do people just buy for now, knowing that they will upgrade at some point? Or is it an idea to buy the most expensive thing available, in the knowledge it will last you longer?

Whether in 12 months your PC will be doing what you need it to do or not there's a small part of you that will be looking at the latest kit thinking 'I might have one of those.....'. Most of us suffer from that bug dont we? I realised a long time ago that buying for the future in the IT realm doesnt really work as they'll be something quicker, better and more expensive out shortly after you've spent all your hard earned cash. I buy the best I can afford at any given time and leave it at that. The only time I wont spend the maximum of my available cash is when I can deem something to be too expensive for the benefit, e.g. a 256GB SSD or GTX295.

The Phenom IIs are much better value for money, are very easily overclocked and even beat the i7 in some benchmarks.

The only Phenoms with even a vague shot at the i7 (and that's a stock i7 mind you) are the X4s. At that price, you're into i5 money and not far off i7 money.

If I was to get a Phenom it would probably be an X2 as they're so frickin cheap. But we still haven't really settled on whether cheap, or not, is the way forward....

Veato, do you really buy a car, TV, or any other consumer purchase over a few hundred quid with just your current needs in mind? Or do you think a little about what you might need in the short to medium-term future? I wouldn't buy the cheapest TV, because I know it'll bite me in the ass when I eventually get a Blu-Ray player. Equally though, I wouldn't buy a 50" Pioneer plasma. Not because I don't want one, but because I can't justify the additional expense given the incremental improvement it will offer me.

Of course yes, but I find PC tech advances so quickly (and so goes out of date somewhat) that its hard to plan ahead.

The only advice I can give is to get a chip that'll complement your chosen GPU for your games, and as cheap as possible

I also believe that there's little point in trying to future-proof with computers unless you are seriously considering video editing, programming etc

Right, points taken people. But have you realized what I'm talking about. This isn't the "normal" scenario. 920 has been out for a year already and is still king of the hill. With 930 on the horizon and 6 core Gulftown as an upgrade platform in the medium term, the i7 platform holds the promise of being a long-running thing that defies the usual upgrade cycle. That's why it's different this time.

That makes a deal of sense. Sounds to me like you're already convinced you need i7

What I'm convinced of, is that if you're gonna spend £320 on i5, you might as well spend £420 on i7! I wanted to know what other people thought of my logic. There's still an argument for £200 on an AM3 setup that will be fine for now.