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Bleh!

YANBFB

#2 = YAFOSP

Price hasn't dropped on this much it seems. It's a great proc though. Used it in a build for friend and it screems.

Whats better this or a i7 920

depends on your situation. If you have the mobo and ram to support the 9550, this is a better deal. but if you are getting a new rig (mobo, ram, cpu). I would seriously consider going i7. this will get you ahead of the tech curve.

See #6
If I were building a new machine at this point I'd definitely go with an i7 since I'd theoretically have nothing invested in LGA775 hardware. Since I have a mobo that supports the older chips and ddr2, I'm looking at getting a quad care to last me as long as possible before I have to purchase a newer motherboard, i7, and ddr3.
I disagree with the statement that you will "be ahead of the tech curve" if you get an i7. It will, however, set you up with ddr3, which is still expensive, but will drop in price and give you better performance than ddr2. It will give you a mobo that supports the i7 processors, which will be the standard intel chips for some time to come, so you can upgrade you processor in the future, once faster i7's come out and drop in price, or you can upgrade your mobo to one with more features without having to invest hundreds of dollars in other hardware.....

See #6
If I were building a new machine at this point I'd definitely go with an i7 since I'd theoretically have nothing invested in LGA775 hardware. Since I have a mobo that supports the older chips and ddr2, I'm looking at getting a quad care to last me as long as possible before I have to purchase a newer motherboard, i7, and ddr3.
I disagree with the statement that you will "be ahead of the tech curve" if you get an i7. It will, however, set you up with ddr3, which is still expensive, but will drop in price and give you better performance than ddr2. It will give you a mobo that supports the i7 processors, which will be the standard intel chips for some time to come, so you can upgrade you processor in the future, once faster i7's come out and drop in price, or you can upgrade your mobo to one with more features without having to invest hundreds of dollars in other hardware.....

Please punch yourselves in the mouths for using the burp terms "mobo" and "rig".

YABADABADOO

#9 please castrate yourself if you haven't already.

This is going for 280 on newegg. Considering that, this is a good price for a quad core that can also be overclocked pretty high. There isnt a single thing out there software wise game wise that needs more power then this except crisis, and with crisis on full settings there isnt a single processor sold to consumers that can handle it. So save your money on buying i7 and motherboard and ram.. Cause its going to cost you 700 dollars just for the lowest combo. The improvements are not significly better at this point.

Mostly agree w/ #7- if you go w/ i7 you're talking an investment in a new mobo and new memory. Both will be more expensive than what you'd buy for the advertised chip (or another LGA775 chip, g Q6600).

Where I only partially agree w/ #7 is that if you get an i7 (LGA 1366) mobo today, you won't necessarily be able to buy another chip using the same socket in the future.

For example, I bought a cheap Dell a few years back that was LGA775. It would take any LGA 775 chip that came out around the time of that mobo, and any before it, but few if any after it. For example, Q6600, E6600, etc. wouldn't work, even though they'd physically plug into the board.

Read the web sites that do benchmarking, etc., and I think you'll see that the i7 is faster than what came before it, but not so much faster that it's worth being on the bleeding edge (in my opinion, and for my uses). It's not like when the Core2 chips came out and blew away AMD, not to mention the crappy chips Intel had been putting out for the last few years.

Sometimes you can get 2 megs of DDR2 for the price of a combo meal at McDonalds (w/ a rebate). You can get a decent board for $50, and a good CPU for less than $100. And I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference vs. an i7 for most of what you do. If you're a gamer, the graphics card is way more important in virtually every game and every case.

Last thing- this is a better chip overall, but I'm not sure it's worth the extra dough over a Q6600. The above chip is a little more future proof, but depending on how long you'll keep the system before your next build, I'd say it probably doesn't matter much.

Disclaimer: Unless you have money to burn, always do your own research before making these decisions.

put it in a simple way:
Got more $$, doing mostly video editing, file converting...etc, go for the i7.
Gaming and regular use, Q9550 is good enough. Plus the price difference with the i7 can get you either more RAM or better video card (to play games).

Just some personal thoughts.

See #6
If I were building a new machine at this point I'd definitely go with an i7 since I'd theoretically have nothing invested in LGA775 hardware. Since I have a mobo that supports the older chips and ddr2, I'm looking at getting a quad care to last me as long as possible before I have to purchase a newer motherboard, i7, and ddr3.
I disagree with the statement that you will "be ahead of the tech curve" if you get an i7. It will, however, set you up with ddr3, which is still expensive, but will drop in price and give you better performance than ddr2. It will give you a mobo that supports the i7 processors, which will be the standard intel chips for some time to come, so you can upgrade you processor in the future, once faster i7's come out and drop in price, or you can upgrade your mobo to one with more features without having to invest hundreds of dollars in other hardware.....

According to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html, the Q9550 scores 4,100 and the I7 920 5,292. So that is better than a 25% performance benefit. Q660 is 2,763 so about half the perf of the I7 920.

I need a fast single user workstation to run Access or possibly SQL database. Access is single threaded so I really don't need the quad cores. But what I have seen with testing I pretty much need to go to the quad cores to get faster response. Doing some testing of my Access app I find a Pent 4, 3.2 GHZ is litterally 10 times slower than on a XEON 5420. This ties out to the difference on the Passmark scores as well. So I am hoping a I7 920 will be faster still.

Some of the large data processing I run on the P4 can take overnight to finish, so cutting that down from 10 hours to 1 hour would be great.

I picked up a Gigabyte UD3 MB + 6G Ram for $230. Adding a I7 920 for $230 brings me to $460 for this setup, and I should be able to overclock to a faster speed.

Those extra 3 cores are pretty much a waste, so if someone knows of a single or dual processor which could run as fast or faster, for a reasonable price, then let me know!

By the way I find disk speed doesn't affect my Access DB speed very much. Running from a 2GB RAM drive or a 7200 ATA gives me the same test results. Running from a local disk or from the network also gives me the same speed for my test db crunching. Access is limited to 2GB so I imagine the whole DB gets loaded into RAM anyway so disk speed is not affecting the app much. Running from a USB attached 2.5" 5400 disk does drag my test down by 25%.