Heck, I thought $299 was a good price for this chip, it's the crazy ass $300-450 motherboards and super expensive DDR3 that won't let me pull the trigger on this. I hear these overclock very well. And YES I NEED Quad core and have some serious video rendering to handle.

I'm never on the bleeding edge...

sadly, I have to concur with #20

AMD is just as stable if not more stable than intel. They are basically the same core chips.

mobo! wait what

I'm hoping that the combination of Intel having a bad quarter and AMD coming out with the Phenom II will cause these CPUs and the X58 motherboards to drop in price faster than normal.

#24, these are not remotely the same. The i7 is a new architecture. Elements of it to map to AMD in general philosophy, but, in general, this is a major move forward for Intel.

The numbers of these look pretty good, but there are only limited motherboards below $300. I'm guessing that by Q2 there will be several decent boards below $200 and the chip will be down another $40-50. Anyone heard when the 8 core is supposed to debut?

Still too expensive/bleeding edge. Wait for the price drops, specially after AMD starts shipping in quantity.

Wait What

MATLAB/Simulink users, this thing is a screamer. Up to 6 times simulation speed improvement (e 2 MNode Finite element done in 1 hour as opposed to all day). Great stuff.

Tempting but no dice. Not in the mood for buying a mobo and ddr3 ram.

#12, If only 2 of you guys have computers, are these rest of the town people using on typewriters?

i don't game and i don't overclock but i do business apps, ftp and some photoshop.

q6600 seems to be getting old - what's a good bang for the buck? do i need quad over duo? is quad really oriented to games or does it truly help two ftp's and an app running?

the e8400 looks interesting for $165 but the q9650 is about the same speed for $519.. say wha? what am i missing? http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/Photoshop-CS-3,826.html

#12, oh too true.